Guide to setting up WebDAV for Windows XP clients

Question

I've recently set up an XServe as a Windows domain controller, and was looking to WebDAV as an easy way of setting up remote access to certain shared files. However, it was not as straightforward as it seems - Windows is somewhat fickle about WebDAV and the Mac OS X manual states that "Microsoft platforms use an authentication mechanism that may make it difficult or impossible to mount WebDAV volumes from Mac OS X" (Web Technologies PDF manual, p. 45). After a great deal of scouting on the internet, I managed to get it working and thought I'd better share my method, since it's not all that straightforward. It's been mentioned on the Apple Forums before, but I don't think it was resolved. Much of this information comes from Mac OS X Hints but is updated in accordance with my experiences. (Some line breaks may be inserted by accident - make sure that lines are correct or you could have syntax errors). By default, Windows XP uses NTLM authentication for WebDAV access - you know this when it keeps popping back up with a password box, with the username in the form domain\username. This circumvents that, although I'm a little sketchy on the details - this is a compiled guide, based on my admittedly humble understanding of the authentication protocols.
1. Enable mod_encoding and mod_headers in the Modules panel of the Web service in 'Server Admin'.
2. Make a backup copy of your httpd.conf file (the main Apache configuration file):
% cd /private/etc/httpd
% sudo cp httpd.conf httpd.conf.backup
Uncomment the following two lines in httpd.conf:
AddModule mod_headers.c
AddModule mod_encoding.c
3. (The following from benoitc's macosxhints.com article.) Paste the following in at the end of /private/etc/httpd/httpd.conf:
# Set DAVLockDB for webdav support
DAVLockDB /private/var/run/davlocks/DAVLockDB
# Fix header for webdav
BrowserMatch "^WebDAVFS/1.[012]" redirect-carefully
BrowserMatch "Microsoft Data Access Internet Publishing Provider" redirect-carefully
BrowserMatch "Microsoft-WebDAV-MiniRedir/5.1.2600" redirect-carefully
BrowserMatch "^WebDrive" redirect-carefully
BrowserMatch "^WebDAVFS" redirect-carefully
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
Header add MS-Author-Via "DAV"
</IfModule>
<IfModule mod_encoding.c>
EncodingEngine on
NormalizeUsername on
</IfModule>
4. Create the folder you want to share with WebDAV:
% sudo mkdir /Library/WebServer/Documents/dav
% sudo chmod -R 775 /Library/WebServer/Documents/dav
Open httpd.conf again and zoom down to the end of the file and add this text (make sure you're consistent if you change the folder name to something else):
Alias /dav /Library/WebServer/Documents/dav
<Location /dav>
DAV On
AuthType Basic
AuthName "WebDAV Restricted"
AuthUserFile /private/etc/httpd/passwords/webdav.access
require valid-user
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Location>
5. Create the password file and the user:
% sudo mkdir /private/etc/httpd/passwords
% sudo htpasswd -c /private/etc/httpd/passwords/webdav.access davuser
Provide a password when prompted.
6. Restart apache:
% sudo apachectl graceful
This is all you need to do on the OS X box. However, I found that this alone didn't work - I was trying to use 'basic' authentication (I tend to start easy, get that working, then add complexity/security later), which has been turned off by default in Windows XP Service Pack 2. XP also does not seem to support SSL encryption for WebDAV access.
7. To get the above to work with Windows XP Service Pack 2, back up the Windows registry and add the following DWORD key with regedit.exe:
HKEYLOCALMACHINE\SYSTEM \CurrentControlSet\Services \WebClient\Parameters\UseBasicAuth
Set the value to "1", close regedit.exe and reboot your PC.
8. Open Internet Explorer, select Open... from the File menu, enter http://ip.address.of.server/dav and tick the 'Open as Web Folder' option.Press OK and enter the username and password you set up with in step 5.
All improvements/comments are welcome - good luck!
XServe   Mac OS X (10.4.4)  

Answer 1

Well it says "System Requirements: Windows XP or later"
So I assume that means that it would be installed on the Windows partition.
It also says "If you do not have any Boot Camp drivers installed, it will install version 2.1 drivers onto your already installed Windows OS."  So doesn't that mean I could use the download instead of the disk to install the drivers? Or is there more to it?