Living in the age of internet, the demand of network storage is never met. There are many use cases:

• Store images and videos filmed by smart phones to save the local disk for apps
• Store the backup of apps or mobile systems to make use of the recovery tools
• Share files with friends
• and more...

There are cloud services targeting these demands. However, they are very limited in terms of storage capacity, long-term reliability and cost efficiency. A better solution will be to set up a private cloud.

WebDav

WebDav is a HTTP-based file serving protocol. It basically maps the CRUD operation on files to POST/GET/PUT/DELETE requests. WebDav has everything supported by HTTP protocol, including basic authentication and TLS encryption.

I personally use the basic authentication to secure my private shared folder. To share with others, more complicated authentication strategy is required, which is not discussed here.

To set up a WebDav server, one can make use of container. This image is a good helper if only basic authentication is required.

To use a WebDav server on Windows, the network drive mapper is required. However, an authentication problem comes in to way after all the correct setup. This post has a rescue.

1. make sure the WebClient service is up
2. edit HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SYSTEM > CurrentControlSet > Services > WebClient> Parameters in the registry so that the BasicAuthLevel is set to 2
3. reboot Windows