[jcifs] Davenport and Mac OS X

Michael B Allen mba2000 at ioplex.com
Fri Oct 8 01:15:23 GMT 2004


Kevin Chan said:
> Hi,
>
> I have been attempting to connect to Davenport using Mac OS X's native
> webdav connection capabilities. As far as I have tested, this does not
> appear to be possible as Mac OS X does not recognize NTLM authentication.

I don't believe Mac OS X can behave as a Windows domain client so
natrually it cannot negotiate NTLM as the credentials would not be found
in the Windows SAM database.

>  From what I have found, it looks like the only way to implement Davenport
> for access via Mac OS X via webdav (read and write) is to use "basic
> authentication". Am I correct to assume, this means basic authentication
> via Apache using htpasswd (or htdigest or whatever)? I was hoping that we
> would be able to maintain one set of passwords for all of our users, so I
> hope I am interpreting this inccorectly.

No, just turn on SSL on the web server and enable Basic authentication in
Davenport. The way this works is Davenport will negotiate Basic to get the
user's user/pass and use that to connect to the target SMB server. So the
web server doesn't actually do anything with authentication. Davenport
handles it all.

>
> Also, is there any documentation on how to setup Davenport for
> connectivity
> with Mac OS X? I have read through the API for Davenport, but
> unfortunately, I am still confused as to how I should be setting up
> Davenport for use with Mac OS X.

I don't believe there is anything special about Mac OS X with regard to
WebDAV so I wouldn't expect there to be documentation for it specifically.
Windows users just have the luxury of transparent authentication
out-of-the-box because they can do NTLM. For Mac OS X you need to just
dump NTLM and go with Basic Auth (and make sure you use https or passwords
will be in plaintext!).

Mike


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