Brian Mearns wrote:
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 7:48 PM, Angelo Chen <angelochen960@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[...]
If your users use Windows workstations, you don't need a special client, the normal Windows Explorer will do. Configure a location on your server that will be shared as a "DAV folder". Say it corresponds to the location "/shared-folders" from an Apache point of view. Look at the on-line docs to do this properly (http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_dav.html), and pay attention to the "Security Issues" (you are going to allow users to write to your server's filesystem, so do this carefully). To connect to this server folder, and make it look to your users just like a remote "network folder" in the Windows Explorer, have them do the following : In Windows Explorer (not IE, the normal File Explorer), go to "my network places" and click on "create a new network place" (or whatever it's called in English). Click Ok a couple of times, until it asks you for a URL. Then enter "http://myhost.mycompany.com:80/shared-folders"; and click OK. If you have configured authentication (highly recommended), it will now ask you for a user-id and password. When you're done, you'll see a new directory in the Windows Explorer, into which you can just drag and drop files from the local workstation. A tip : when entering the URL above, make sure to enter the ":80" part after the hostname, even if it is the standard port 80. Otherwise, Explorer will think this is a Windows network share, and pop up a message saying it can't find it.Well, there's a DAV module, which is an extension to the HTTP protocol that has additional methods (to GET, POST, HEAD, etc.) for sharing files...but I believe that requires a special client to use the additional methods.
Unless you find a well-tested module which does this kind of thing, I would recommend against it. It is just too easy to make mistakes there, in terms of server security e.g., and consequently exposing your whole server to risk. DAV is a well-tested module and will avoid many pitfalls.If you know a server-side scripting language, such as PHP, it would be pretty easy to write a web app to do what you're looking for, and I'm sure there are several that exist already (though I don't know of any specifically).
Now, once again, just to make sure you have got the message : when you "share" a directory on your server via DAV, you are giving the possibility to users to see all that's in it with their Windows Explorer, and to upload files to it, possibly overwriting what's already there. So do not do this, for example, with your DocumentRoot or the /etc directory. Ok ?
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