[Using Sakai] WebDAV & Sakai
Daniel Merino
daniel.merino at unavarra.es
Mon Feb 16 03:14:00 PST 2015
I'm sorry for being so late into this discussion about WebDAV. I just
want to give some information that could be useful for others.
-Even with Drag&Drop available and even if they must use WebDAV as
simple FTP with Cyberduck, our users are big enthusiasts of WebDAV. At
least while Drag&Drop specification doesn't include downloads of files
and folders.
-It's difficult to say where is located the failure when WebDAV fails,
but I think that the best option is trying to connect to Longsight's
10.4 QA server. Latest WebDAV is located there and, for example, I
cannot use WebDAV as a remote folder from Windows 7 in our 2.9.2 server
but it works fine when I connect to https://qa10.longsight.com/ .
Besides, Sam Ottenhoff commited to take a look on issues there.
-There is a software to test WebDAV connections,
(https://github.com/tolsen/litmus) but I found that our 2.9.2 passed the
tests even not working on Windows 7. I don't know if there is a better
option out there to test WebDAV, but I would love to hear of it.
-We also found a propietary software (http://www.webdrive.com/) that
worked fine with our 2.9.2 WebDAV, allowing to use it as a system's
remote folder like Marshall demands. If you don't mind to pay, maybe
this could be a solution in a short term.
Hope it helps.
Best regards.
El 15/02/15 a las 23:20, Marshall Feldman escribió:
> Laura is exactly right, although her comments point to a long-term
> solution but I'm hoping to resolve this in the next week or two.
>
> Universities are fond of saying their faculties do teaching, research,
> and service and that the three functions all contribute to each other.
> But although not entirely, Sakai and other LMS's tend to silo not only
> the three functions but within the teaching function courses from each
> other and within individual courses separate activities from each
> other. For example, if for my research I am reading an article on my
> iPad and think, "Say, this would be a great supplemental reading for
> both the research methods course and the theory course I'm teaching
> this semester," how many steps must one go through to share the
> article this way? It should be as easy as one step: "Share with xxxx:
> Research Methods and yyyy: Theory for Practitioners." But with Sakai
> and other LMS's today, we're talking a dozen steps at least. And this
> is about as simple an example as one can imagine.
>
>
> On 2/15/15 4:23 PM, Laura Gekeler wrote:
>> Well now you've gone and done it Marshall... all this WebDAV stuff
>> aside, what we're really pointing out here is that we believe file
>> system access to files in a Sakai course site repository should be
>> accessible outside of Sakai, isn't that it? We'd like to use end
>> points and sharing from many different places, including:
>>
>> * mounted and behaving like a native part of the OS file system.
>> * using 3rd party tools like Cyberduck
>> * and inside Sakai too, we should be able to copy or link to a
>> Sakai file in another course site, if we want.
>> * How about from inside an ePortfolio system, so students can
>> choose the same file they submitted for an assignment, as part of
>> a portfolio they're building?
>> * What about learning analytics? At some point we're going to need
>> to search files from their linked endpoints (or otherwise
>> traceable copies) in our analytics data warehouse in order to do
>> text mining of assignments in the spring of 2015, of sophomores,
>> which received A's ....
>>
>>
>> WebDAV isn't the solution (interim maybe), but something like WebDAV
>> expresses the requirements for the beginning of a solution. Such a
>> solution will be at the core of a learning ecosystem.
>>
>> IMO
>> Laura
>>
>>
>> Laura Gekeler
>> LMS Administrator //Concurrent Instructor
>> Teaching and Learning Technologies
>> University of Notre Dame
>> P:(1) 574-631-2402
>>
>>
>> On 15 February 2015 at 16:08, Marshall Feldman <marsh at uri.edu
>> <mailto:marsh at uri.edu>> wrote:
>>
>> Chuck,
>>
>> I understand your point. For years Microsoft claimed to work with
>> WebDAV, but Microsoft's implementation was notoriously buggy.
>>
>> OTOH, Cyberduck is primarily a file transfer program that can use
>> any of several protocols, WebDAV being one of them. WebDAV, OTOH,
>> is a way of using files on a web server as part of a distributed
>> file system. Since in any file system one can move files,
>> Cyberduck may do a very good job with this aspect of WebDAV on
>> Sakai. But just because it can use this facet of WebDAV
>> successfully does not mean Sakai's implementation is complete or
>> without bugs.
>>
>> So as an end user, I'm still at this point caught between several
>> parties pointing fingers. My local support person claims that
>> Sakai doesn't really support WebDAV's distributed file system
>> feature because Sakai keeps its files on varying machines in a
>> cluster. Apple claims its OS works with WebDAV, and I've used it
>> successfully with other WebDAV servers. So this also points to
>> Sakai as the culprit. Some of the responses to my original query
>> have implied that our local configuration of Sakai is at fault.
>> Your reply implies that Sakai's implementation of WebDAV works,
>> but Cyberduck functionality is not proof, as I said.
>>
>> So, I'll try a third rephrase of my question. I am concerned
>> about Sakai providing "fully functional" WebDAV, to any operating
>> system or app anywhere. By "fully functional" I am including the
>> distributed file system aspect. By "app," I'm allowing for a more
>> comprehensive app than Cyberduck, one that would actually make
>> the local operating system see the WebDAV server as a mounted
>> volume, thereby working around any bugs in the native WebDAV
>> implementation. (For example, a company called OpenText
>> <http://connectivity.opentext.com/products/network-file-system.aspx>
>> sells a product that lets PC's share distributed files using NFS.
>> It effectively adds this feature to Windows' native file system
>> access.) So now the question is, "Can Sakai work as a fully
>> functional WebDAV server with any operating system anywhere,
>> whether through the operating system's native WebDAV
>> implementation or through a third-party add-on?" Or more
>> specifically, "Can Sakai provide distributed file system access
>> through WebDAV to any operating system whatsoever, whether or not
>> a special app provides this capability, so that files on Sakai
>> are readable and writable through the native file system's
>> built-in file access capabilities?" In other words, is the
>> distributed file system aspect of WebDAV successfully implemented
>> in Sakai at all?
>>
>> Marsh
>>
>> On 2/15/15 3:01 PM, Charles Severance wrote:
>>>
>>> On Feb 15, 2015, at 1:21 PM, Marshall Feldman <marsh at uri.edu
>>> <mailto:marsh at uri.edu>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> So, to rephrase my original question, does Sakai support WebDAV
>>>> client-server mounting at the level of OS X or Windows? In
>>>> other words, does Sakai support genuine WebDAV as implemented
>>>> on the two most common operating systems currently used in
>>>> academia?
>>>
>>> Marshall - Sakai has a WebDav that we are confident works with
>>> Cyberduck and *may* work with other operating systems. There is
>>> no "formal commitment" that we will do "whatever" the OS/X or
>>> Windows operating system happens to do.
>>>
>>> Having worked in standards and interoperability for a long time
>>> - just saying "we are genuine WebDav" is not at all a guarantee
>>> of interoperability.
>>>
>>> Our WebDav code is based on an WebDav from 2004 and we have made
>>> a few improvements since then. The operating systems feel no
>>> compunction to be careful in using WebDav to maintain
>>> interoperability with anything other than their own
>>> implementations. CyberDuck is more interoperable because since
>>> they are neither Microsoft nor Apple - they need to be a little
>>> more careful how they implement WebDav so as to remain
>>> interoperable.
>>>
>>> Since our webdav is so old, it would take a lot of resources to
>>> try to find and fix all the issues to guarantee it works with
>>> Mac/Windows.
>>>
>>> If we had a lot of resources, we might start over with a more
>>> modern WebDav protocol implementation like this:
>>>
>>> http://milton.io/
>>>
>>> So for now, we can use WebDav if it works but we don't consider
>>> "WebDav not working on Windows" a "bug". We need to work on
>>> things like getting rid of iframes :) Of course if someone felt
>>> strongly about fixing it - they could take the initiative and
>>> build us a new WebDav :)
>>>
>>> /Chuck
>>
>>
>
>
>
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--
Daniel Merino Echeverría
daniel.merino at unavarra.es
Gestor de E-learning - Centro Superior de Innovación Educativa.
Tfno: 948-168489 - Universidad Pública de Navarra.
--
Experiencia no es el numero de cosas que se han visto, sino el número de
cosas que se han reflexionado. (Jose María de Pereda)
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