Linux: Mount WebDav-Share using fstab and davfs2

13.10.2016 Betriebssysteme

Attention: The content is slightly out of date. The information in the text could therefore no longer be correct.

This article describes a way to automatically mount a webdav share at boot by editing /etc/fstab on a debian based linux os like Ubuntu.

<localuser>, <localusergroup>: The username and group of the currently logged on local user
<localdir>: The directory where the webdav share should be mounted to
<webdavurl>: The URL of the webdav share

Setup davfs


sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install davfs2

# Add localuser to group davfs2
sudo usermod -aG davfs2 localuser

# Allow other users than root to mount davfs volumes
sudo dpkg-reconfigure davfs2

sudo sh -c 'echo "/mnt/localdir webdavusername webdavpassword" >> /etc/davfs2/secrets'
sudo mkdir /mnt/localdir

Setup /etc/fstab

gedit admin:///etc/fstab

/etc/fstab

            
...
webdavurl /mnt/localdir davfs rw,auto,user,uid=localuser,gid=localusergroup,_netdev 0 0
...

While root is the mounting user, it is still possible to change the owner of the file system. That is what options uid and gid are for.

Linking to your Home directory

You might want to see the webdav share in your Home directory:

ln -s /mnt/<localdir> /home/<localuser>/WebDav

OwnCloud at DomainFactory

If your login attempt results in

Could not authenticate to server: rejected Basic
    challenge

you should consider adding some lines to the .htaccess of your ownCloud-Installation. The problem occures when PHP is operated in CGI-Mode.

.htaccess


RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTP:Authorization} ^(.+)$
RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization}]
...

Debugging

Messages of davfs2 should be prefixed with a time stamp and "mount.davfs".


grep -Eni "mount.davfs" /var/log/syslog

# optional, enables detailed davfs2 logging
sudo sh -c 'echo "debug most" >> /etc/davfs2/davfs2.conf'