Joe Mocker's Weblog: How'd you know I was blogging at you if you weren't blogging at me?

I use several computers on a daily basis. I've done this for quite a while. At work I have my workstation, at home I have a PC and lots of times I just use my laptop. The problem is I like to try to keep my desktop environment in sync across all those machines as much as possible.

With Firefox, for example, I want all my bookmarks up to date everywhere. And fortunately, for Firefox, I have found an extension quite some time ago which helps do this.

Its currently called Bookmark Sync and Sort, but previously it was called Bookmark Synchronizer [2,3].

What this extension allows you to do is to store your bookmarks on server somewhere, and load them in multiple Firefox instances. It does some cool things like allowing you to merge bookmarks on your server with any changes you've made locally. And it provides multiple protocols for saving and loading the bookmarks, including FTP and WebDAV.

What I did was set up Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 on a server I can access from anywhere I am, and configured a WebDAV collection for Bookmark Sync and Sort. What about security? Well a couple of things. My SJSWS instance is configured for SSL with a self-signed certificate. And I have restricted the WebDAV collection to authenticated users. Bookmark Sync and Sort handles all this great.

So how does one configure WebDAV with SJSWS 7.0? Its actually not that difficult. A good reference is Meena Vyas' SJSWS WebDAV entry.

Specifically, here's what I did. First enable WebDAV with wadm

wadm> enable-webdav --config=<server-instance>

Then create a WebDAV collection

wadm> create-dav-collection --config=<server-instance>  --vs=<virtual-server> --uri=/davx/marks --source-uri=/marks

This will create a WebDAV collection that you access via DAV at /marks, which is a little opposite of usual with WebDAV but we want to make sure the web server doesn't mess with the bookmarks file when it serves it.

Now, that is enough to set up an open WebDAV collection. But it would be good to control access to the collection. So, from the Admin Console, Set up access control. Go to the Access Control tab of Configurations -> server-instance.

Then select the Users tab and create or edit the users and passwords.

Next, go to the Access Control Lists (ACL) tab. Edit the default ACL, and add an entry with the settings

• Access: Allow
• Users & Groups: All in the authentication database
• Rights: All Access Rights

Next, Edit the dav-src ACL, add a similar entry with the settings

• Access: Allow
• Users & Groups: All in the authentication database
• Rights: All Access Rights

Now, Deploy the configuration and you are done.