Accessing Swestore with davfs2

< Swestore national storage

This guide describes how to mount a folder of the SweStore National Storage as a read/writeable folder in your local file-system.

Caveat

There is currently a big problem with using Davfs2 with Swestore: Davfs2 does not currently support Status 302 redirects, which is used by default on Swestore, to redirect you directy to the storage pools for reading (writing is done via central server though). This will cause you problems!

An issue for the problem is filed here: https://savannah.nongnu.org/support/?107402

Prerequisites

• A *nix like Operating System, such as linux (possibly MacOS might work ... and possibly Windows as well, though this is not covered in this article yet).
• The davfs2 package. On ubuntu, you can install it with:
  

  sudo apt-get install davfs2

How to

You need to use your Terena certificate files, and convert them to the PKCS#12 format.

If you have them in .pem format, you can use openssl for this.

You might have them in the form of the following two files:

~/.globus/usercert.pem
~/.globus/userkey.pem

Converted these to the PKCS#12 format with:

openssl pkcs12 -export -in usercert.pem -inkey userkey.pem -out MyTerenaCert.p12

Note: You will first need to unlock your cert with a password you have gave when creating it. Then you need to add a password for the pkcs12 file. Remember this latter password for the later steps!

Copy the p12 cert to /etc/davfs2/certs/private, as root:

sudo cp MyTerenaCert.p12 /etc/davfs2/certs/private/

Edit /etc/davfs2/davfs2.conf:

sudo nano /etc/davfs2/davfs2.conf

At the bottom, add the line:

clientcert                              MyTerenaCert.p12

Create a folder for mounting the filesystem:

sudo mkdir -p /mnt/swestore

Add the following line to /etc/fstab (e.g. at the end):

https://webdav.swegrid.se/snic/<your-account>     /mnt/swestore  davfs   uid=<your-username>,gid=<your-accountname>,rw,noauto 0       0

Mount, according to fstab, as root:

sudo mount /mnt/swestore

When asking for a username and password, just press <Enter> (two times). On the third question, you are asked for the password you gave for the pkcs12 file, which you will have to type in, each time you mount this file system.

Done!

Now you should be able to browse to the mount point:

cd /mnt/swestore
ls -l

You chould be able to create files with content, and read the content:

echo "Testing testing 1 2 3 ..." > testfile.txt
cat testfile.txt

Note however, that you are not able to open the file for updating, with editors such as nano.

Some Links

• Mount Davfs2 man page
• How to convert PEM to PKCS#12
• Mounting WebDav via davfs2 (Ubuntu)
• Install server certificates in davfs2 (Ubuntu)
• Nordugrid Certificate HowTo - Describes the userkey.pem and usercert.pem files