Weave, WebDAV

So, Mozilla Weave is a very Alpha project. It's intent is to sync a bunch of your applications settings and data across multiple machines, via a backend WebDAV server. Currently, it replaces the functionality of Google Reader for Firefox, and seems to be more secure. (Your data is encrypted locally, and the files on the server are provably encrypted/secure at all times.)

However, the backend WebDAV server that Mozilla is running isn't that good. They do let you pick your own WebDAV server, so I decided to put one together. I shouldn't need to back it up; if the central server dies, I'll still have the data on two or more endpoint computers.

WebDAV works on Apache 2. It doesn't work on the (perhaps still more common) Apaache 1.3. Using the NSLU2, follow these instructions to install Apache 2 and Webdav. Debian/NSLU2 still isn't supporting Digest Authentication, but for something of this scope, Basic Auth should be just fine. (The encryption of passwords is more secure with Digest.) These instructions explain basic auth. (Edit: mod auth-digest seems to also cause problems with a limited amount of entopy on the NSLU2. This tutorial gets around it, but doesn't properly update the runlevel, documented over here.)

Meanwhile, the Ubuntu folks have an SSL wiki, which is the reference to use to enable SSL in Apache 2. This was very useful, as the "apache2-ssl-certificate" referenced by every other site was deprecated and removed from Debian/Ubuntu awhile back. For my configuration, I also had to specify the ServerName attribute in httpd.conf, explicitly give the www-data user ownership of the SSL cert, and add Listen 443 to ports.conf.

After that, using Cadaver as a client, WebDAV works just fine. Unfortunately, it appears that the current client for Weave also has some issues, so I'm putting this on hold for a few days, while making the Charlie Brown "arggggh" noise.