Hi there. I'm trying to figure out the easiest way to connect to a webdav server. I know Nautilus can handle it, but Nautilus also has a long standing bug which kind of burns me when doing large file transfers to my personal cloud server on the LAN (which I'm utilizing webdav with), where it absorbs all of my system memory to the point the connection tanks.

I also tried davfs2, but I can't seem to get it to mount where my user can read/write to it. I'm following about a dozen different guides I found online, all of which just say I need to do a sudo dpkg-reconfigure davfs2, select yes, add myself to the davfs2 group, and that's it. Been there, no dice.

So what can I do with connecting (easily, of course) to a webdav server with full read/write access? Any insight?

I haven't touched dav for a long time .. but have you tried cadaver ?

That's CLI only, no? I know I can get my files over via that if I had to, but while I'm a terminal junkie, sometimes it's just not the most efficient way.

I wonder if I could just mount the data directory for where I'm pushing the webdav info via Samba and just log in there?

Ah I see .. davfs would probably be the way to go then, maybe we should troubleshoot that ?

What's that? The Nautilus/.gvfs issue from earlier? There's a bug on it dating back 2 years, but there's been no movement on it.

No, I was going by your original post:

I just figured it out, using this command here:

sudo mount.davfs -o file_mode=775,dir_mode=775,uid=USERNAMEHERE http://YOURSERVERURLHERE.com/owncloud/files/webdav.php /webdav

Seems to work fine without the memory overhead that larger files bring Nautilus/.gvfs. Still be nice to have that bug fixed because the Nautilus/.gvfs method is 100% easier...

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Alright, some new info to throw on the table. I guess the big question now is, is WebDAV SUPPOSED to cache when transferring files?

I'm running several systems here. Laptop, desktop, server. All Ubuntu 12.04 64 bit. The server is running "OwnCloud" which is basically like Dropbox with additional functionality but on your own self hosted server. I noticed something about WebDAV and I'm trying to understand whether this is by design or if there's an actual issue elsewhere.

Reasons I ask is this... I mounted the WebDAV server from Nautilus (which I assume utilizes .gvfs) and sent a 6.0GB file to my WebDAV server. It eventually tanked the connection as my RAM has maxed out (I have 8GB of RAM). Factor in the system and application RAM and you have the remaining ~2.0GB unaccounted for. I sent 8,000 pictures amounting to 30GB to the server via WebDAV in Nautilus and it worked great. But sending a single 6GB file is a different story. I assume the overhead of having to process file by file of the 8k files allowed the system to "let go" of memory quick enough that I never even saw an increase, whereas the single 6GB file being sent over gigabit LAN... different story. That's my assumption, at least.

I found this bug here and thought, oh dang, it's a Nautilus/.gvfs bug. But then I installed davfs2 and mounted my WebDAV server on a local folder I created on root, named simply, /webdav. I used the following command:

I also duplicated the same steps but changing the mount point from /webdav to /home/jason/webdav.

In both scenarios, it still eats up space on my root partition (I have root and home split), likely due to the /tmp directory (I'd have to guess, anyway) taking on the brunt of the caching.

So I guess this begs the obvious question. Is it normal for WebDAV to cache in any way? Is it expected behavior that Nautilus/.gvfs utilize system memory for transferring the files, or would that still be considered a definite bug?

You can use the Connect to Server command to access a WebDAV server.

WebDAV (World Wide Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is a standard for collaborative authoring on the Web. It is a set of extensions to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) that allows for collaborative editing and file management between users via the Internet.

In the Finder, choose Go > Connect To Server, type the address of the server in the Server Address field, and click Connect.

The server address should be in a form similar to this:

http://servername.com/path/

If you change your network settings (by opening Network preferences or by choosing a new location from the Apple menu) while you are connected to the WebDAV server, you should disconnect from the server, then connect to it again. To disconnect, select the server and choose Eject from the File menu.

Thanks bro, but I'm already well past this step.

Still useful to us innocent bystanders who might be facing a similar task from a slightly-different angle (or OS). Thanks for posting, Milkwitzjs.

Agreed. However, my other question still stands. Is WebDAV by design supposed to cache files as they transfer? WebDAV caches files to somewhere in root (I believe /tmp) when transferring via davfs2, while transferring through Nautilus/.gvfs (file - connect to server - etc) caches in RAM. Is this "normal?"

See the "Caching" part of 'man 8 mount.davfs'?