1&1 Smartdrive, GMX Mediacenter and Linux

As a customer of 1&1 Internet, I’m offered a 15 GB (!) Webdrive for private storage of mediafiles and documents, with also the option to share marked folders with others. Same thing for every GMX-Mail customer, with the freemail option, it’s a 1 GB Drive (for mail and storage, but I’m using pop3, so the mails are always only a few mb.

While access via the webinterface works flawlessly with linux, I tried to find better sollutions for using the drive with my linux systems (shared calenders, contacts, etc on all machines)

I found some tutorials, but they did not work out of the box because of older releases either from the tools and the linuxdistributions.

As all United Internet Webdrives (GMX, WEB.de, 1&1) depends on secure webdavs connections, you need to build the davfs (DAV Filesystem) from source.

Grab the newest source-package from http://dav.sourceforge.net/ and untar it with

tar -xzvf davfs2-1.3.3.tar.gz 

You also need the following packages (hint: other distributions maybe rename the devel packages

neon libneon27 libneon-devel openssl libopenssl-devel

switch to the new folder from davfs

cd davfs2-1.3.3/ 

and run the configure tool with support for SSL

./configure --with-ssl

If everything works you can now run

make
make install

second one as root, if you not already are.

Now, within openSUSE /usr/local/sbin is not in the path-variable, so we create a link for better access:

ln -s /usr/local/sbin/mount.davfs /bin/mount.davfs

Also a new mountpoint is needed, i choose

mkdir /media/smartdrive

My davfs install asked for the group and user davfs2, so we create both:

groupadd davfs2
useradd davfs2

Now you can mount the drive as root with:

mount.davfs https://sd2dav.1und1.de /media/smartdrive/ -o gid=users,nolocks=1

It will ask you for your username + password on the commandline, but maybe we can automate this later…

For GMX, now it is easy to do the same, just create another mountfolder

mkdir /media/mediacenter

And mount it

mount.davfs https://mediacenter.gmx.net /media/mediacenter/ -o gid=users,nolocks=1

Now mounted, it is only possible for the root user to write to the webdrives. To avoid this uncool thing, we add some entries to /etc/fstab

https://mediacenter.gmx.net/ /media/mediacenter/ davfs user,noauto 0 0
https://sd2dav.1und1.de/ /media/smartdrive davfs user,noauto 0 0

This will NOT mount the drives on boot, but now every user within the group davfs2 can mount it and have read/write access.

To add your user to this group call as root

usermod -G davfs2 <USERNAME>

Now users can mount the drives with

mount /media/mediacenter

or

mount /media/smartdrive

Last thing - avoid to re-enter username and password everytime needs a special file in the users homedirectory, This makes it easy, to have different drives mounted for every user

https://mediacenter.gmx.net   mailaddress@gmx.de   yourpassword
https://sd2dav.1und1.de/      mailaddress@1und1.de yourpassword

It is needed to keep this file only viewable for yourself chmod 600 ~/.davfs2/secrets as user should do it.

• http://dav.sourceforge.net/
• http://www.linux-user.de/ausgabe/2006/02/078-gmxfs/index.html
• http://www.linux-club.de/viewtopic.php?t=17243