Re: sitecopy webdav doesn't recurse?

Joe Orton wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Mar 23, 2005 at 06:08:25PM +0100, Lars Eggert wrote:
> 
>>I'm trying to use sitecopy to mirror a large webdav server. However,
>>sitecopy doesn't seem to recurse, it only downloads a single directory.
>>It creates the subdirectories correctly, but doesn't download their
>>contents.
> 
> The WeBDAV request sitecopy uses ("depth infinity" PROPFIND) is defined
> by the WebDAV RFC to recurse the entire tree; I wasn't aware of any
> server which broke this rule, but apparently you have one which does -
> can I ask, what is the server?

This particular one is an apache 1.3.33.

However, note that the webdav install instructions explicitly recommend
to _disable_ "depth infinity" propfinds! So I expect this to be rather
common, and maybe a future version of sitecopy should reflect this; I'd
be happy to help test :-)

>From http://www.webdav.org/mod_dav/install.html

Preventing "Depth Infinity"  PROPFINDs

A PROPFIND request with a  Depth:&nbspInfinity header can impose a large
 burden on the server. These kinds of requests could "walk" the  entire
repository, returning information about each resource  found. mod_dav
builds the response in memory, so these kinds of  requests could
potentially consume a lot of memory (the memory  would be released at
the end of the request, but the peak can be quite large).

 To prevent these kinds of requests, the  DAVDepthInfinity directive has
been provided. It is a simple on/off directive, which can be used on a
per-server or  a per-directory/location basis. The default value for
this  directive is off, meaning these kinds of  requests are not allowed.

 NOTE: the WebDAV Working Group has stated that  it is acceptable for
DAV servers to refuse these kinds of  requests. Properly written client
software should not issue  them, and you should not worry about
disabling them.

> sitecopy should really do a manual directory-by-directory recursion over
> the tree but I haven't got round to implementing that (and have little
> motivation to do so really).
> 
> So this is a server misfeature and/or a sitecopy misfeature - choose 
> your poison...

Lars
-- 
Lars Eggert                                     NEC Network Laboratories

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