Re: Interoperability of MSIE 5 with PyDAV

Jim Davis wrote:
> ...
> All we know is that MSIE didn't successfully connect.  it did not utter any
> diagnostic or complaint.  on the PyDAV side, we see in the logs that MSIE
> did am OPTIONS, followed by a GET, then a POST, then said nothing else.
> 
> PyDAV does not support POST.
> 
> Note that an earlier version of PyDAV responded to POST with status 500,
> which is not the right way to show that POST is not supported.  It now
> returns 501.

mod_dav will return a 404 on the POST, which (I presume) allows IE5 to
proceed further. I saw the same OPTIONS, GET, then POST. After the POST
fails, then IE will issue an OPTIONS followed by a PROPFIND. *then* it
goes belly up :-)  (well, just sits there with a dialog open)

I've already traded a couple rounds of email with the IE5 team. They
were quite helpful and pointed out a couple problems in mod_dav that
have been corrected in the 0.9.2 release. They've run some tests against
the new release, but I haven't heard any feedback yet.

For now, I'm assuming they're correcting some issues on their side, then
we get to do another round :-)

> ...
> [Note that the only mime type in ACCEPT is auth/sicily.  As it happens,
> PyDAV ignores the Accept header anyway, but if it did try to obey it, it's
> not clear how it could have returned a resource of type 'auth/sicily'.
> Besides that, what is "sicilian" authorization?  A request you can't say
> "no" to?  :-)]

Sicily was the code name for Distributed Password Authentication (DPA).
DPA is the primary authentication mechanism used by the Microsoft
Membership System (part of MCIS and Site Server). Basically, it is an
enterprise-scale authentication/authorization system for Internet sites
(e.g. MSN and Compuserve).

> ...
> [PyDAV does not support POST at all.]

See if you can return a 404 as a temporary hack and whether that gets
IE5 further along. It would appear that IE5 may have a logic error in
that a 5xx error affects the process (a guess based on the processing
after my 404 return vs. your 501).

Cheers,
-g

--
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/

Received on Wednesday, 18 November 1998 21:11:01 UTC