Using Apple's WebDavFS for Mac OS X with WebDAV on IIS 7

Today's blog post needs to have a disclaimer right up front - I freely admit I'm not a Mac OS X expert, so I may not have everything 100% correct in this post. But I've seen a lot of questions on forums.iis.net that discuss using IIS WebDAV with Mac OS X, so I thought that I'd share a few of the things that I've noticed. Just the same, if I were writing a formal walkthrough I would have said something like, "Microsoft is not responsible for the behavior of Apple's Mac family of products. The information that is provided in this topic is provided to assist Mac OS X users connect to IIS using WebDAV."

All that being said, here are the prerequisites for getting your environment together:

• Your server needs to be running Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, or Windows 7.
• Your server needs to have Internet Information Services 7 and the WebDAV module installed. (Note: See the Installing and Configuring WebDAV on IIS 7.0 topic for more information.)
• For best results, your Mac client needs to be running OS X version 10.4 or later.

Connecting to a WebDAV server using Mac OS X

• In Mac OS X, open Finder.
• Choose Go, then Connect To Server.
• Enter the URL of the WebDAV server in Server Address. For example:

  http://www.example.com/path/

• Click Connect.

For more information, please see the following help topics that are available on Apple's Web site:

• Mac OS X 10.4 Help: Connecting to a WebDAV server
• Mac OS X 10.5 Help: Connecting to a WebDAV server

Troubleshooting WebDAV connections using Mac OS X

These are some of the issues that I've seen:

• WebDavFS connections are read-only if WebDAV LOCKs are disabled on the server. Because of this:
  • If you are using WebDAV 7.0 on IIS 7 you will not be able write files to the server; this is because WebDAV locks were not available in this release.
  • If you are using WebDAV 7.5 on IIS 7 you will need to enable locks before you can write files to the server; this is because WebDAV locks are disabled by default. (Note: See the How to Use WebDAV Locks topic for more information.)
• WebDavFS connections attempt to create files that may be blocked by IIS:
  • "Desktop Services Store" (.DS_Store) files. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.DS_Store for a description.)
  • "Resource Fork" (e.g. "._filename.ext") files. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_fork for a description.)

  Allowing unknown MIME types for WebDAV requests should allow these file types, and that setting is located under Web Settings action for the WebDAV Authoring Rules feature of IIS Manager.

  

  For more information, see the following topics that are available on Apple's Web site:

  • Mac OS X 10.4: How to prevent .DS_Store file creation over network connections
  • Mac OS X 10.4: Windows Server 2003 IIS Web Server fails GET call on .DS_Store and ._ files

In Closing...

I have to reiterate that I'm not a Mac OS X expert, so this list is probably not all-inclusive, but it's helped to resolve some of the issues that I've seen.