Weblog, WebDAV, Windows and iDisk.
Have been struggling with trying to access iDisk to setup blogging from my office machine, but it seems like I am a bit out of luck. At least so far. The thing is that I am behind a firewall and can only access outside via an HTTP proxy. It’s been not too bad lately — I can now even SSH tunnel outside (e.g. I can access CVS repositories that have :ext: option enabled). This, however does not help the task at hand: accessing an external WebDAV resource like iDisk.
My first attempt was to try and use My Network Places, but it kept on stubbornly refusing to provide a logon prompt and, naturally was failing to connect (whether I used http:// or https:// URL).
I have then decided to try and use command line tool like nd or cadaver to try and access iDisk. I had some luck with nd — I was able to connect, but only if I:
- Explicitly declared the namespace with -a option
- I had to provide “proper” path — I could not try and read idisk.mac.com/ceesaxp (run like that nd segfaults, actually), but I could idisk.mac.com/ceesaxp/Sites.
I was not very sure what parts of nd are really working, as --help/-h lists quite a few items (like -c for copy remote file) as not being implemented. I’ve also tried to use eldav.el — an Emacs package that provides WebDAV support. It is, basically, an Emacs frontnd to nd, and it did not work for me at all, but this might be due to Windows Emacs, rahter than to any faults of eldav.el. Will have to check it on a non-Windows machine [Update Note: it did not work on FreeBSD either — I suspect that the problem might be with authentication. While it looks like it tries to access resource, it does not display any content, and when trying to savve it seems to try and do so locally.].
The other thing I tried was cadaver. It’s like an FTP client for DAV. I tried it the night before on my BSD machine and it worked. Not pretty, but working. Unfortunately, no such luck on a Win machine. When run with debug it seems to be mishandling the proxy, by trying to pass OPTIONS command through it (and gets rejected).
I will have to, I guess try out some commercial software — but it is a pitty that none of the above seemed to work out for me...
Oh!.. Before I forget — sitecopy was also behaving very funny claiming that remote was fully in synch with local, even though local was completely empty... Hence — no blogging (at least for now) from the working space. Hey — I’ll bw more productive! :)
