WebDAV Share Points Missing in OS X Server 10.8

Question

WebDAV Share Points Missing in OS X Server 10.8

WebDAV share points are missing in OS X Server 10.8.

To see for yourself:

1) Do a clean-install of OS X Server 10.8 with a single admin account and a .local host name.

2) In Server.app -> File Sharing, enable WebDAV access for the three default share points: /Groups, /Public, /Users.

3) In Finder -> Go -> Connect to Server -> http://server.local/webdav/ and log-in as the admin account.

Note that only the admin account's networked Home directory appears. There is no WebDAV access to the enabled share points.

4) In Finder -> Go -> Connect to Server -> afp://server.local and log-in as the admin account.

Note that the three default share points appear, along with the networked Home directory. AFP allows access to the enabled share points.

Any suggestions for a fix, or work-around?

Mac OS X (10.7.1)

Posted on Aug 20, 2012 5:03 PM

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Answer 1

Aug 20, 2012 7:05 PM in response to Larry Goldman

I tried adding my own share point and that worked, but only for a while. Eventually, all share points disappear from the Finder -> Connect to Server -> http://server.local/webdav

Interestingly, though, when logging in using Transmit with the same credentials, all the share points _do_ appear.

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Answer 2

Aug 22, 2012 10:24 AM in response to Larry Goldman

Does access to your webdav share work as expected when you omit the 'webdav' in the url?

ie, use http://server.local

rather than

http://server.local/webdav

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Answer 3

Aug 22, 2012 8:50 PM in response to David Kurtz2

Yes - but why?

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Answer 4

Aug 23, 2012 12:28 PM in response to David Kurtz2

David Kurtz2 wrote:

Does access to your webdav share work as expected when you omit the 'webdav' in the url?

ie, use http://server.local

rather than

http://server.local/webdav

David:

Thanks for the tip: yes, http://server.local works in 10.8.

1) This behavior is different than Lion Server 10.7, where I believe the "/webdav" was required.

2) In OS X Server 10.8, using "/webdav" fails silently, instead of responding like 10.7 used to. This means that WebDAV users which were setup for 10.7 will be broken after migrating the server to 10.8.

3) Where is this rather significant change in behavior documented?

4) In 10.8, if "/webdav" is not a valid WebDAV share point, the server should respond with some kind of error instead of failing silently.

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Answer 5

Aug 23, 2012 1:40 PM in response to Larry Goldman

Agree on Larry Goldman's comments and the issue I had with this was _very_ subtle. Some of the apps/clients accessing the old "/webdav" sharepoint path worked and I was even able to mount from the MacOS finder to that path (e.g., "https://www.example.com/webdav/user") but go flaky behavior with files/folders not appearing even they existed and/or disappearing upon rename, etc. This could be an artifact of upgrading from a 10.7 server to 10.8?

Everything is pretty much now OK (thanks to David's tip above!) by getting rid of the "/webdav" portion of the path on my subscribing clients/apps with one exception. When iCal tried to subscribe to a published calendar ".ics" file (not managed under the iCal server, but just a file created by another app (OmniFocus) and put in a WebDAV location), I had to use the full "https://www.example.com/webdav/user/folder/cal.ics" path (i.e. with the "/webdav" portion included for iCal to see the file ...

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Answer 6

Aug 24, 2012 9:36 AM in response to bebopagogo

Yes, 10.8 messed up WebDAV Sharing in a boneheaded way. Also, on a related issue, 10.8 dropped Apache SVN support which was present in 10.7 and so far, I have not been able to get it working again.

But really, out of the milllions and millions of new iOS users, who cares? Apache doesn't "tweet". Apache does not drive new sales at the various Apple Stores.

For $19, do you really expect your business-critical server to function as expected? To come with documentation? To have serious, effective server tech support, or even an Apple Engineer on these discussions to field questions?

If I wanted to spend endless days fiddling with open-source software in Terminal, I would be running Linux. Maybe that would be more productive than wasting my time finding and overcoming the (new, hidden) defects in each new version of OS X.

The days of "it just works" are gone. Hello OS X Vista. Seems like the visionary techies are being pushed out of Apple for the Biz School guys who have little understanding about what they eagerly toss to the side. It is now a post-PC world, indeed.

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Answer 7

Aug 25, 2012 5:02 PM in response to Larry Goldman

I agree with Larry Goldman on this 100%. OS X 10.4, 10.5, 10.6 were rock solid when released. Starting with 10.7 it's been Vistaville all the way. Combined with fanboi arrogance, this has been totally frustrating.

There was a file/directory permissions error in 10.7.0 through 10.7.3, This permissions error caused endless random untracable problems and Apple said NOTHING about it. This wasn't fixed until 10.7.4, and a month later Mountain Lion came out.

"Don't reopen windows at startup" didn't work until 10.7.4 either - causing no end of headaches and problems, but Apple shipped 10.7 out the door with this glaring bug. Nobody at Apple saw this? Nobody tested this? It took a year for Apple to finally to fix it?!?!

Lion was a broken piece of **** until 10.7.4, and I cannot imagine all of the user frustration that must have occured as a result of these two problems, but how many other problems wreaked havoc, undetected?!?

I guess all the seasoned Apple devs went over to iOS, and the beginners are working on OS X. It really shows.

When I booted Lion and Mountain Lion for the first time, all kinds of buggy weirdness reared its ugly head. Windows not closing, artifacts remaining on screen, preference setting reverting without reason, fields not accepting input, Safari suddenly unable to connect to the internet (even though Chrome worked perfectly at the same time for the same URL), yada yada yada...

It used to be Microsoft that made their customers find all their OS bugs for them because it was cheaper than writing clean code from the beginning.

Today, quality control and testing have obviously gone out the window at Apple. They need to spend more of that $100 billion on QA and less on marketing.

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Answer 8

Jul 29, 2013 8:45 AM in response to Larry Goldman

Don't even bother with out-of-the-box OSX server. Just use Macports and do it yourself.

Actually, some of the problems with OSX 10.8 are really from Apple not keeping up to date on all the BSD programs it uses. Example is MySQL for Mac is still stuck on version 5.0 because they don't want to deal with users having to upgrade their tables to at least 5.17. You can get all the latest ports from Macports and just change your path in /etc/profile to look at /opt/local/bin before /usr/bin to override the defaults.

Using Linux instead of OSX is not as good (to me) as using Macports unless you are doing virtualization because Linux has way less overhead.

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