Using WebDAV with ARR
Application Request Routing (ARR) is a great solution for load balancing and other proxying needs. I’m a big fan and have written often about it.
I had someone ask me this week about WebDAV support for ARR. With his ARR setup, he noted that WebDAV creation, uploads, and downloads worked well, but renaming and moving files did not. He aptly noticed in the IIS logs that the source IP address showed as being from the ARR server rather than from the original user.
Here’s what the IIS log recorded:
2013-01-28 10:36:20 10.11.12.13 MOVE /Documents/test https://domain.com/Documents/test 80 User 10.9.8.7 Microsoft-WebDAV-MiniRedir/6.1.7601 400 1 0 31
The 10.9.8.7 IP Address is an IP address on the ARR server. And yes, the real IP address has been replaced with a made-up IP to protect the innocent.
To be honest, I haven’t tested WebDAV with ARR yet, but the issue sounded like the proxy-in-the-middle issue. I suggested installing ARRHelper on the web servers, and sure enough, that took care of it. While I didn’t setup a full repro myself, he confirmed that it worked for him after the ARRHelper install so I feel quite confident in saying that WebDAV will work with ARR as long as ARRHelper is installed.
So for anyone working with WebDAV and ARR and it doesn’t work for you, it’s likely that ARRHelper needs to be installed on the web servers.
You can find ARRHelper here, and if interested, I have a short video explaining what it is and why it’s important.