mount_webdav not playing nice

DominikHoffmann · #1 June 23rd, 2005, 07:05 AM

This is sort of a blog of my struggle with mount_webdav. The purpose of making this work is to have a cron job that invokes rsync periodically and has it mirror a directory on my server to a remote WebDAV server (not a .Mac iDisk), to which I have write access.

Setup: I have a file called "Password" which contains user ID and password for the WebDAV server in the format specified in man mount_webdav. I used emacs to enter the null characters in the long integers specifying the string lengths of user ID and password. I then (credit goes to a post at Mac OS X Hints) issue the calls, as root,

Code:

mkdir /Volumes/ft1 
cat Password | mount_webdav -a0 http://ft1.mydomain.com/dir1/dir2 /Volumes/ft1

Now, when I try to

Code:

ls -la /Volumes/ft1

to see what mounted I get an error

Code:

ls: /Volumes/ft1: Input/output error

and

Code:

cd /Volumes/ft1

results in

Code:

could not get current directory: getcwd: cannot access parent directories: Input/output error

What I then have to do is issue the commands

Code:

mount -f -t webdav /Volumes/ft1 
rmdir /Volumes/ft1

to unmount the volume, which apparently was never really mounted. Using GUI WebDAV clients like Goliath or Transmit there is no problem with mounting the server, which is running on a Linux box, by the way. Thus I know that it's not the server's fault.

Interestingly, the system.log contains these lines from the time during which I attemted the WebDAV mount:

Code:

Jun 9 22:26:41 xserve webdavd[473]: /Volumes/ft1 mounted 
Jun 9 22:26:41 xserve webdavd[473]: main: accept(): Socket operation on non-socket

Interestingly these entries were in 24-h GMT format, while all other system.log entries were Eastern time.

I am stuck. I really don't know how to proceed, but I would very much want to get this to work. Any suggestions are appreciated.

awolfe_ii · #2 July 15th, 2005, 10:42 AM

What's your OSX version? I just upgraded to Tiger and it broke my access to a nice LAMP/webdav setup I had working under Panther.

DominikHoffmann · #3 July 15th, 2005, 10:50 AM

My system is 10.3.9. However, mount_webdav is supposed to be different in Tiger.

Dominik Hoffmann