TechNote (Archived)

Troubleshooting WebDAV Connections

This TechNote offers several suggestions for troubleshooting a failed WebDAV connection. Because of the many factors that can cause a WebDAV connection failure, however, you may need additional assistance after trying the four suggestions below.

	Installing the Dreamweaver 4.01 Updater.
	Trying another WebDAV client.
	Looking at the transfer logs.
	Checking the server configuration.

Installing the Dreamweaver 4.01 Updater.
The Dreamweaver 4.01 Updater addresses several issues with Dreamweaver's original implementation of WebDAV, as outlined in the bullets below.(For other issues addressed by the 4.01 updater, including those dealing with Netscape 6, Visual SourceSafe, and Macintosh OS 9.1, see the 4.01 UpdaterRelease Notes).

	Dreamweaver now provides a fully qualified domain name for the site rather than improperly populating the "Host" field with an IP address.
	Dreamweaver accepts all HTTP header capitalizations without case-sensitivity. For example, Dreamweaver will no longer distinguis between WWW-authenticate and Www-authenticate. Note: This problem manifested itself most commonly when connecting to a Zope server.
	Dreamweaver can handle ports numbered higher than 32767.

Trying another WebDAV client
Trying to connect with another WebDAV client can provide you an excellent source of clues. The fact that the other client is also unable to connect suggests the existence of a problem on the server side. Other WebDAV clients include: DAVid and Goliath (Macintosh), CaDAVer (Unix), DAVExplorer (Java) and WebFolders (Windows). Information about these clients can be found on WebDAV Resources.

Looking at the transfer logs
The server's error logs also provide information which may help with troubleshooting the failed WebDAV connection. (Dreamweaver does not have a built-in HTTP transfer log, so you will need to access the server's error logs). If you do not have access to those error logs, contact your server administrator or IT department about getting this information. Once you have reviewed the error logs, check the list of errors against a list of HTTP error codes.

Checking the server configuration
An incorrectly configured server may be a source of trouble. Configuring a WebDAV server can be particularly difficult when common HTTP requests and WebDAV communications are taking place on the same port.

	For IIS: To properly configure an IIS 5 server for managing WebDAV and basic HTTP attempts, see Transferring files using WebDAV with Internet Information Server 5.0 (TechNote 14968).
	For Apache: Consult the many resources available at WebDAV Resources. In particular, see the section Mod_dav Installation and Configuration.
	For Zope, Virtuoso, Python and other servers: Consult your server documentation for configuration instructions.