Slide ACLs

This week I started actually developing ACLs for a Python WebDAV client. Originally the thought was to use http://www.infrae.com/download/pydavclient, but MorgenSagen decided it was too complicated for his needs. So I looked into the old davlib, and later into the WebDAV.py that Morgen wrote. More work to implement ACLs, but shouldn't be too bad.

Now the biggest problem seems to be that I can't get my Slide WebDAV installation support/show ACLs. Supposedly access control should be enabled out of the box, but the acl property is not visible. Haven't figured out how to do this.

Supposedly Slide WebDAV comes with authentication turned on as well, but that didn't seem to be true either. The docs on how to disable authentication for testing purposes seemed to turn it on. Weird! Next problem was how to specify the user and password. Supposedly uncommenting that piece should have done it, but it didn't. Changed from the default 'tomcat' user to 'root' from default slide, after which it seems to work, except I see error messages in Slide logs about premature end of file.

If anyone knows how to get fully working authentication and access control working please get in touch... Otherwise developing ACL support can be a little tricky.

WebDAV+SSL in Python

All is not lost, however. I realized I had not tested https://www.sharemation.com. After creating the free account, I was quickly able to test that our SSL WebDAV support is working (checked in minor tweaks).

Next I realized that the Sharemation server has ACL support turned on. I can finally start testing against that...

Wohoo! I can read acls and other acl related properties, as well as set acls. For example, here are two files, first of which is readable by all, while the second is only readable by me:

• https://www.sharemation.com/heikki2/hello.txt
• https://www.sharemation.com/heikki2/secret.txt

All done using Python. Setting acls is hardcoded still to some canned values (they can get pretty complicated because servers can define their own).

-- HeikkiToivonen - 07 Jan 2005