Planned for 11.34 Web Disk access script for Windows 7 [Case 57511]

[Treb_HR]

3 production level releases away.

Well, the plugable auth is 3 releases away. Hopefully webdav-digest will be among those plug-ins.

[Kent Brockman]

Whoa! When cPanel release 11.34 we will surely be using Windows 8 and maybe for that version Microsoft has improved/corrected the issue

[Unic-Dev]

I'll not talk about Microsoft over here. Cause I don't have any good reason for it
But, IMHO it's always a better option to use FTP for these things. I do it in three steps. Zip at local - FTP - Unzip on server.
It is much faster and secured.

Regards,
Mahesh
UnicHost Web Solutions

[Astral God]

No recent news for this ?
Thanks.

[sneader]

The title of the thread shows "Planned for 11.34". That means that it will be implemented in the next major release of WHM. The current release is 11.32, and the next one will be 11.34.

- Scott

[sneader]

FYI, here is the transcript of the Podcast that David mentioned. As I see it, if the customer simply goes to the Microsoft KB and clicks the "Mr. Fix It" button, it will apply a fix to their OS and Web Disk would work on Windows 7.

Lindsey: Are website owners able to use the WebDisk feature while running Windows Vista and Windows 7 on their desktop?

Erin: Yes, they can. However, there is a caveat involved. And that has to do with the fact that Windows 7 and Windows Vista does not allow connecting to WebDAV services through the use of what’s called HTTP basic authentication. And that is actually enabled by a small modification in the Windows system registry. There’s actually a Microsoft Support Knowledge Base article. Its number is 841215. You can find that at support.microsoft.com. And they’ll tell you how to enable HTTP basic authentication so that you can use cPanel’s WebDisk service.

The Microsoft KB Article link is: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/841215

[GeniouS]

Fix not for Win 7

[dwykofka]

It's really not an acceptable solution if clients have to go apply a patch / fix in order to use it. We need something that works out of the box with the current OS.

[SoftDux]

When can we actually expect a fix for this issue? Windows 7 is the defacto standard OS on any new PC or laptop right now and this causes a lot of support overhead and unnecessary frustration for users who expect the feature to work

[cPanelDavidG]

When can we actually expect a fix for this issue? Windows 7 is the defacto standard OS on any new PC or laptop right now and this causes a lot of support overhead and unnecessary frustration for users who expect the feature to work

A fix for this is dependent upon the implementation of Pluggable Authentication: http://forums.cpanel.net/f145/whm-pa...-a-154665.html

[paulmasri]

I've just been encouraged by cPanel support staff to add my vote for getting this sorted ASAP. I used to use WebDisk on Windows XP and so I happily said to a new hosting customer that I could support a shared online filespace for their business. As we're all on Windows 7 now, this has actually been a nightmare. It has wasted about 4 hours of my time and isn't exactly a confidence booster for this new customer.

In case anyone needs a workaround, I've found BitKinex which is a Freeware download, currently v3.2.3. It's easy enough to set up a web disk - I suggest connecting to https://yourdomain:2078 and selecting the HTTPS option to connect securely. The only downside really is that it looks a bit techie (i.e. not as seamless as a mapped drive) and for some reason splits over two separate windows. On the plus side, it lets you drag'n'drop not only between the local/remote panels within BitKinex but also to/from a Windows Explorer window. (You need to reboot Windows after install to get this last bit working.)

I'll be using this workaround with the current client, but it's unfortunate cPanel is soooooo slow at getting a proper solution out. Windows 7 ain't exactly new!

[jimmcc]

+1 for Windows 7 compatibility.

BTW, just wondering if cPanel has considered adding a different app to cPanel that would essentially provide the same function without running into the Windows 7 roadblocks?

[craignyc]

It's all good. By the time 11.34 comes out, Microsoft will decide, "we haven't been able to figure out how to get WebDav to work consistently between XP, Vista, 7, and every service pack in between (even though no other OS vendor seems to have a problem)" and then they'll just take Webdav out of Windows completely. That's what they do to all of the features they can't figure out how to fix. Don't think WebDav is perfect in XP, it's buggy as hell outside of cpanel.

Keep in mind too that you won't have a problem accessing Webdisk on every other operating system. Microsoft changed how Windows handles Webdav YET AGAIN, and keeping up with that is just one more thing on the list of things the cpanel devs have to do. Not saying it's not an important feature to get working in Windows 7 -- I really need it too, but in a world where OSX, Linux, and countless third party applications can connect to Webdav perfectly fine and Windows 7 is the outlier, I think at least some of the anger needs to be directed at the people who made this stupid change to Windows that broke Webdav.

As for FTP, it is an outmoded protocol that is subject to a plethora of issues and I don't even mean just security -- the way today's Internet works causes all sorts of connection problems with FTP what with the way different ftp clients, different routers, and different operating systems handle active and passive FTP. The entire world should have been on Webdav long ago.

[dwykofka]

Craignyc the problem is that the VAST majority of our customers are using Windows. For every 50 customers using windows I MIGHT have 1 using OSX/Linux. What really matters is not who screwed it up or why or that it works in obscure configurations (osx/linux) it's that the majority of cPanel end users cannot use this function and something needs to be done about that.

Are there any non traditional java / etc webdav opportunities out there?

[Deroba]

I support this! I need to cast my voice.