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112233last Wednesday at 5:07 PM6 repliesview on HN

Mounting WebDAV -- if you are in a situation, where you have to do it (e.g. own^W^W^Wnextcloud) is such an adventure. Everything - mac, win, linux - supports WebDAV. You mount and it works! Then you notice HOW it works: files are downloaded in full before program can access them, some operations are super slow, some fail or time out, plaintext credentials in mysterious places...

I heard DeltaV is very advanced, and Subversion supported it. I'm afraid to ask.


Replies

hurflmurfllast Wednesday at 7:48 PM

I'm using the nextcloud app on my android, and for my Linux systems I mount WebDAV using rclone, with VFS cache mode set to FULL. This way I can: 1. Have the file structure etc synced to local without downloading the files 2. Have it fetch files automatically when I try to read them. Also supports range requests, so if I want to play a video, it sort of streams it, no need to wait for download. 3. If a file has been accessed locally, it's going to be cached for a while, so even if I'm offline, I can still access the cached version without having to verify that it's the latest. If I'm online, then it will verify if it's the latest version.

Overall, this has worked great for me, but it did take me a while before I set it up correctly. Now I have a cache of files I use, and the rest of the stuff that I just keep there for backup or hogging purposes doesn't take disk space and stays in the cloud until I sync it.

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Fnoordlast Wednesday at 8:46 PM

> own^W^W^Wnextcloud

own^H^H^Hnextcloud

or

own^Wnextcloud

You might wanna look into OpenCloud (formerly known as nextcloud-go) [1]. I still use Nextcloud for the uploading of files and the calendar (though I may switch the latter), but I now sync the dir with Immich. Performance-wise a relief. I also swapped Airsonic Advanced (Java) with Navidrome (Go). Same story.

[1] https://github.com/opencloud-eu/opencloud

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blacklionlast Wednesday at 11:03 PM

Windows officialy removed support for WebDAV. It still works, but nothing is guaranteed. It has stupid limitation on file size of 10MB, it can be lifted to 2GB (max signed 32 bit number) in Registry, but it is still not very much in modern world (I wanted to share my medial library via WebDAV and failed due to this limitation). It lose credentials on regular basis, errors are too vague («Wrong credentials» means both mistyped password AND expired server certificate), etc.

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n3stormlast Wednesday at 5:13 PM

Subversion works ok over webdav, it has done it for decades.

Mounting a directory through nfs, smb or ssh and files are downloaded in full before program access them. What you mean? Listing a directory or accessing file properties, like size for example do not need full download.

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jjkaczorlast Wednesday at 5:43 PM

Actually - I believe - within Windows 11 - the "WebClient" service is now deprecated (which is what - IIRC, actually implements the WebDAV client protocol so that it works with Windows File Explorer, drive mappings, etc.)...

Played around with WebDAV alot... a long time ago... (Exchange Webstore/Webstorage System, STS/SharePoint early editions)...

heavyset_golast Thursday at 2:58 AM

Regarding Linux, WebDAV has been partially working/broken in Dolphin/kio since Plasma 5 on KDE. I've found the davfs2 FUSE module to be more reliable.

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