WebDAV for accessing fileserver for iOS apps

With the sudden onslaught of iOS apps that can use WebDAV for syncing, along with the fact that we are not happy with our user's data being stored in North Carolina (evil IT overlord strikes again) we are looking for a WebDAV solution for iPads & iPhones.

We need:

• Authentication against LDAP (preferred), RADIUS or Samba

• WebDAVing mounting (for want of a better term) of the users home folder on the fileserver, or perhaps a folder within their home folder that is actually a mount to elsewhere.

• File server can be Samba on Ubuntu (preferred), Windows or if we have to, OS X.

We are trying to avoid having the complexity of Sharepoint or Confluance, but it would be great if there was an out of the box system.

The best solution we have come up with is a homemade PHP/Apache mod_dav and mod_rewrite/LDAP construction, but it does give the webserver full root access to the file server, which is proving a bit unpopular!

Solution 1:

I do this for personal use with a Windows machine. It's pretty simple to set up with IIS. Just enable the WebDAV module, create your WebDAV site, give it a .* MIME type (application/octet-stream should work) so IIS won't give you 404s for unrecognized extensions, and shut off all application mappings for the site (ASP, ASP.NET, etc). Once you've done that, you can disable anonymous access for the site and set up appropriate filesystem permissions. If the server is involved in Active Directory, then those users will be able to authenticate and access whatever is there based on the filesystem permissions you set.

So far this has been working nicely with Pages and Scanner Pro, and I've also been using it to publish and share calendars in .ics format for a few years now (Outlook, iCal, iOS, etc).