Mounting a WebDAV folder with davfs

I am in the process of setting up a virtual Linux box at Quantact. Eventually this box may replace my home server, and thus I need some decent backup solution for it.

There are a couple of pages on the net that cover davfs2, a loadable module that allows to mount a WebDAV folder into the file system. It didn’t work out of the box, the mount command returned with

/usr/lib/mount.davfs-2.6: Could not open /dev/davfs0

A look into /var/log/syslog revealed the message

modprobe: FATAL: Could not load /lib/modules/2.6.16-xen/modules.dep: No such file or directory

As it turned out, my Xen VM didn’t have any modules installed. According to the davfs2 documentation the kernel needs to load coda support as loadable module. With the help of Quantact’s IRC channel (thank you, timster!) I found out that I had to fetch the modules for my Xen VM first, unpack the coda module and put it into the /lib/modules directory.

The steps I had to take on my Xen virtual machine were as follows:

apt-get install davfs2
wget http://www.quantact.com/dl/2.6.16-xen.tgz
tar xfz 2.6.16-xen.tgz
cp 2.6.16-xen/kernel/fs/coda/coda.ko /lib/modules/2.6.16-xen/kernel/fs/coda/coda.ko
depmod -a
sudo mount -t davfs https://mediacenter.gmx.net /mnt

Success! Now I can put my backups to the GMX WebDAV folder.

Rails on Ubuntu

Joe wrote a nice, clean and straightforward tutorial of how to install Rails on Ubuntu Breezy.

By the way, if you enter “rails apache2″ into Google, it returns said article as the very first result. Interesting …

I started to follow the tutorial around 8 pm, and now, two hours later, I am done. Of course, in this timeframe I did not only install Rails. I created a new Ubuntu installation from scratch (actually a VMware-image), and put Rails with Apache 2 and FCGI on it. Works great!

Now I only need to find the time to rewrite WordPress with Rails ;-)