How do I make a simple public read-only WebDAV server with SabreDAV?

Question

I recently began looking into WebDAV, as I found it to be an option for letting me play a Blu-ray folder remotely - i.e. without requiring the viewer to download the whole 24gb ISO first.

Add a WebDAV source in Kodi v18 to a Blu-ray folder - and it actually plays! Very awesome.

The server can also be mounted on Windows with

net use m: http://example.com/webdavfolder/

or in Linux with

sudo mount -t davfs http://example.com/webdavfolder/ /mnt/mywebdav

-and should then (in theory) play with any software media players that supports Blu-ray Disc Java (BD-J), such as PowerDVD and VLC.

vlc bluray:///mnt/mywebdav --bluray-menu
PowerDVD.exe AUTOPLAY BD m:

(Unless of course time-out values has been set too low, which seems to be the case for VLC at the moment).

Anyway, all this is great, except I can't figure out how to make my WebDAV server read-only. Currently anyone can delete files as they wish, and that's of course not optimal.

So far I've only experimented with SabreDAV, because afaik that's the only option I have if I want to keep using my existing webhost. Trying with very minimal setups, because I've read that minimal setups should default to a read-only solution. It just doesn't seem to happen.

I initially used the setup from http://sabre.io/dav/gettingstarted/ and tried removing some lines. Also tried calling chmod 0444 MainFolder -R on the webserver. And I can see that everything does get a read-only attribute. But it changes nothing. It's still possible to delete whatever I want. :-(

What am I missing?

Maybe I'm using the wrong technology for what I want to do? Is there some other/better way of offering a Blu-ray folder for remote viewing? (One that includes the whole experience - i.e. full Java menus etc).

I should probably mention that all of this is of course perfectly legal. It is my own Blu-ray project - not copyright material.

Also: Difficult to decide if this belongs on StackOverflow or SuperUser. I ended up posting it on StackOverflow because SabreDAV is about coding, and because there's no sabredav tag on SuperUser.

Answer 1

You have two options:

• Create your own file/directory classes for sabre/dav that simply throw an error when trying to delete. You can basically start with a copy of Sabre\DAV\FS\Directory and Sabre\DAV\FS\File and change the methods that do writing.
• Since you're considering just using linux file permissions, really the key thing you are missing is that that 'deleting' is not controlled on the file or directory you're trying to delete. To delete a file or directory in unix, all you need is write permissions on the parent directory. However, I wouldn't recommend going this route as doing this will just cause a weird error in sabre/dav, which might leave clients in a confused state. It would result in a 500 error, not the expected 403 error.