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Tue Apr 14 19:54:53 2009 UTC (14 years, 10 months ago) by wbaumann
Branch: MAIN
CVS Tags: rel-1-4-4, rel-1-4-5, rel-1-4-0, rel-1-4-1, rel-1-5-5, rel-1-5-4, rel-1-5-3, rel-1-5-2, rel-1-5-1, rel-1-5-0, rel-1-6-0, rel-1-4-7, HEAD
Branch point for: minimize-mem, rel-1-4-6
first import

1 davfs2 1.2.2 2008-01-24
2 -----------------------
3
4 # Copyright (C) 2006, 2007, 2008 Werner Baumann
5
6 # Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification, are
7 # permitted in any medium without royalty.
8
9
10 FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
11
12 Q: What are these files with size 0 and date of 1970-01-01?
13 A: WebDAV allows to lock files that do not exist, to protect the name
14 while you are preparing a file for upload. These "locked-null-resources"
15 will show as files with size 0. This is OK as long as the locks are
16 released some day.
17
18 Q: But the size-0-files don't disappear. How can I get rid of them?
19 Q: Some files cannot be accessed because they are locked. But I know for
20 sure that nobody uses them.
21 A: It can happen that locks are not released:
22 - An WebDAV client may crash.
23 - The network connection may get down before the locks are released.
24 - ...
25 How davfs2 tries to handle this:
26 - It sets a timeout for locks, when they should be released automatically.
27 - It sends a lock-owner property, so it can identify its own locks.
28 - Whenever it discovers that a file is locked, it tries to discover whether
29 it owns the lock. In this case it will reuse the lock and then release it.
30 But not all servers will support this.
31 Sometimes, only the administrator of the server may be able to free stale
32 locks. It would be a good idea if the server implements an administrative
33 timeout for locks, because it is impossible to make sure that all clients
34 will always release locks properly.
35
36 Q: When I try to save may backups to the WebDAV Server, davfs2 creates another
37 copy on disk, so I run out of disk space. Why does davfs2 do this?
38 A: davfs2 will always create a local copy of all files moved between the local
39 computer and the server. There are several reasons for this:
40 - The coda kernel file system needs this. It will only read and write to
41 local copies.
42 - davfs2 is not able to do incremental uploads. So davfs2 needs to get the
43 whole file from the application before it can send it to the server.
44 davfs2 really is not a replacement for network file systems like nfs.
45
46 Q: When I unmount a davfs2 file system, umount blocks and it sometimes takes
47 hours before it returns.
48 A: This is intentionally. umount should not return before all cached data is
49 saved to the media. The time needed depends on the amount of data and the
50 transfer rate. It is almost unnoticeable for a hard disk, some minutes for
51 a floppy, and for davfs2 it varies with the quality of the connection.
52 Note: You should always unmount davfs2 file systems before you shut down
53 your system. On shut down mount.davfs will usually be killed
54 regardless of the time needed to save data.
55
56 Q: Displaying large directories with nautilus or konqueror is very, very slow.
57 Is there a way to speed this up?
58 A: Reason is that this programs open every file in a directory to evaluate the
59 file type. mount.davfs has to download them all. Even if the files are
60 cached, it will have to ask the server whether there is a new version.
61 You may try the configuration option 'gui_optimize'. This will not help when
62 you visit the directory for the first time, but when the files are already
63 in the cache it will reduce response time.
64
65 O: When I mount a resource form Microsoft IIS, I can create new files, but when
66 I try to open them I get an error saying 'File does not exist'. This does not
67 happen when the file is named something.txt or something.doc, but it happens
68 for instance with files named something.odt.
69 A: Microsoft IIS only serves files with extensions and MIME-types that are
70 registered with IIS (or Windows). But when files are created it does not apply
71 this restriction. So you can create a new file with e.g. OpenOffice.org and
72 when you try to open it again, IIS will tell it can't find it. But it really
73 exists in the servers file system.
74 By default, only extensions used by Microsoft are registered (because you do
75 not want to use file formats that are not owned by Microsoft.). To change
76 this you have to register all file extensions you want to use. You may also
77 register a wildcard extension.
78 - Open the microsoft management console for IIS.
79 - Select the WebDAV folder within IIS you want to use.
80 - Right click and choose: Properties->HTTP-headers->MIME-types->new
81 - Edit '*' as extension and 'application/octet-stream' as MIME-type.
82 - Apply the changes.
83 - Select your IIS (the server as a whole, not just the WebDAV folder).
84 - From the menu choose actions->all tasks->save configuration on disk
85 - Restart IIS.
86 Please Note:
87 I had to retranslate the names of menu items from Microsoft's German. So the
88 exact naming in English might be different.

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