[Using Sakai] WebDAV & Sakai

[Marshall Feldman]

Chuck,

Sorry, my choice of words was poor and lends itself to an interpretation
exactly the opposite of what was intended. I should have said, "Is there
even a single operating system or app that works with Sakai and provides
"fully functional WebDAV" capability, including the ability to mount the
Sakai file system for more than just file transfer?"

I fully understand the issues about resources and constraints. My first
job after graduating college was as a systems programmer in a nuclear
physics lab at MIT. The mainframe I worked on had been purchased as part
of a two-year grant, the second year of which was cut off. So it had
half the memory, disk storage, etc. than it was supposed to. Most of my
time was spent figuring out how to make a system with only 512K of RAM
do the work of one assumed to have 1 MB. (It was 1969.)

Nonetheless, I spent (wasted) almost a day trying to make Sakai work the
way I understood it to be designed to work. If the legacy version of
WebDAV can't meet all expectations, its capabilities need to be
documented clearly and completely so that others don't waste their time
either. (At MIT, most of my time during the first six months on the job
was devoted to documenting the modifications we'd done before and
establishing documentation standards for the future.)

    Marsh

On 2/16/15 8:55 AM, Charles Severance wrote:
> Marshall - 
>
> The WebDav in Sakai is the best we can make it within the limits of
> the resources we have and the effort the community is willing to put
> into it.   If you test some combination that we have as documented to
> work and that fails - the "finger" should point at us - period.
>
> I attach the documentation for WIn8, Win7, WInXP, Mac, and Linux
> below.  You should alway look a the instructions to try to get it to
> work because some of the instructions have special steps or caveats
> built in.
>
> Our WebDav is based on a legacy implementation from the early 2000's -
> it is kind of amazing that it continues to work as well as it does
> over ten years later (see attached documentation).   It is a testament
> to a community of caring folks that pitch in and help whenever an
> operating system client gets tweaked and breaks mounting.
>
> To answer your question below "Does Sakai provide "fully functional"
> WebDAV, to any operating system or app anywhere?" - the answer is
> "no".  The phrase "fully functional, any app, anywhere" - is an
> impossible compliance expectation.  I doubt any WebDav server (even
> SharePoint) would say "yes" to that question.
>
> If in your use you find something - it will always be possible to fix
> it given the availability of resources.  And unlike Microsoft or other
> proprietary vendors - in Sakai we talk openly about what works and
> what does not work - and we involve you in those discussions - which
> can be frustrating where there is not a simple "yes" answer - but in
> reality - far superior to working with a proprietary vendor.
>
> /Chuck
>
> P.S. I will be out at UCI at the Coursera partners conference the week
> of March 1 - perhaps we could sit down and talk more about this or any
> other Sakai questions you might have.
>
> On Feb 15, 2015, at 4:08 PM, 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
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