Austin Godber wrote:
> Hi Allen,
>     I have been wanting to try to use Mozilla Calendar to do this sort 
> of thing. It seems that the backend is just a webDAV capable web server 
> and the clients are all just Mozilla with the Calendar extension:
> http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/
> http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/faq.html#share
> 
> It uses ical standard.
> 
> Austin

[ WARNING - The following instructions are not meant for a production 
machine.  Security issues with web_dav are not trivial.   Read the 
mod_dav website.  And remember ... pay attention to your auth mechanisms 
to you aren't sending cleartext passwords across unprotected networks.]

OK,
	I have just installed this on a debian unstable apache test server of 
mine (say http://test.server.com).  It was relatively easy to get it up 
and running.  Assuming apache was installed and working I:

1.) Added libapache-mod-dav

# apt-get install libapache-mod-dav

This made some modifications to httpd.conf which I accepted.

Then I added a directory to store my dav stuff and made it world 
readable/writable:

# mkdir /www/dav
# chmod 777 /www/dav

then made some changes to the httpd.conf file to turn DAV on for that 
directory:

...
Alias /dav "/www/dav"
<Directory /www/dav>
   DAV On
</Directory>
...

I restarted apache.  Then I downloaded the USHolidays.ics ical file from:
    http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/caldata/USHolidays.ics
and copied it to the new dir:
    # cp USHolidays.ics /www/dav/
made IT world readable and writable
    # chmod 777 /www/dav/USHolidays.ics

Then on the client side after I installed the Mozilla Calendar I ran 
that and:
- clicked on the "Calendars" tab on the upper left
- right clicked below "My Calendar" and chose "New Calendar"
- set name to "test" and remote location to 
"http://test.server.com/dav/USHolidays.ics"
- clicked the "Publish changes Automatically" box
- clicked OK

These events from this calendar should now show up.  If you add an event 
to a date using "New Event" and then tell it to use the "test" calendar 
file the changes will automatically be saved to the server.

In fact if you don't even bother with the above instructions about the 
Holiday file you can just publish "My Calendar" by:

- right click on "My Calendar"
- choose edit
- add http://test.server.com/dav/austin.ics
- choose publish automatically

Now add events to that calendar places the austin.ics file on the server 
and makes it usable.

Of course these instructions are just an example and likely very unsafe 
... you are likely going to want to use some sort of authentication for 
your users so people cant bork up other peoples calendars.  Either way 
this is pretty cool, there is another thing that people like to tell me 
they use Outlook for that Mozilla can do.  So I have the LDAP directory 
service and now shared calendaring taken care of.  I just need to figure 
out LDAP auth so I can integrate this with my lab authentication ... 
with SSL of course.


Austin