Re: PROPFIND requests from gnome-vfs?

[Navindra Umanee <navindra cs mcgill ca>]

Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org> wrote:
> Mozilla/IE don't provide WebDAV browsing functionality, AFAIK. If you go to
> a WebDAV resource in Nautilus, it will give you a directory listing, not an
> HTML page. (Wish I could point you towards tigert's old mac.com WebDAV thing
> but it is all subscription-based now.)

On the assumption that GNOME users don't want to edit dot.kde.org at
the directory/file level, and they aren't being malicious, this would
point to a usability issue with GNOME, IMHO.

However, as someone pointed out, this really has less to do with
Nautilus than with Galeon (and others).  And by all accounts so far,
PROPFIND makes even less sense here...  so that would make it an
implementation/performance issue with GNOME.

# not so bad now that we don't process PROPFIND
80.58.8.107 - - [21/Apr/2003:14:36:40 +0200] "PROPFIND
/1021838067/1022774059/ HTTP/1.0" 403 432 "-" "gnome-vfs/2.2.3"
80.58.8.107 - - [21/Apr/2003:14:36:40 +0200] "GET
/1021838067/1022774059/ HTTP/1.1" 200 35528 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U;
Linux i686) Gecko/20030410 Galeon/1.3.3"

# this poor user suffered a 5 second delay
218.61.14.15 - - [21/Apr/2003:11:38:01 +0200] "PROPFIND /1049927346
HTTP/1.0" 403 420 "-" "gnome-vfs/1.0.5"
218.61.14.15 - - [21/Apr/2003:11:38:06 +0200] "GET /1049927346
HTTP/1.0" 200 13681 "-" "gnome-vfs/1.0.5"


Oh and btw, it might be nice in theory to accept any old garbage at
the HTTP level cause it's the spec and all.  But our server gets such
extreme amounts of abuse at the HTTP level that I've found that
filtering everything (and auto-banning) except GET/HEAD/POST helps *a
lot*.  Of course, I'm now handling PROPFIND differently because of the
GNOME users.

PROPFIND was actually problematic for us because it was getting
processed by default.  Turns out all those Zope servers out there have
WebDAV enabled by default and some of them can't even turn it off.
Nasty horrible mess.

Later,
Navin.