[SOLVED] Problem mounting directory with davs:// under Ubuntu (dav:// is working)

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#1

Hello,

this is my first post, so I hope to be in the right section. I am running the latest Nextcloud 20 appliance from https://www.hanssonit.se/nextcloud-vm/ on a proxmox host. I am running it exclusively in a LAN so I am using a self-signed SSL certificate (let’s encrypt needs a FQDN).

I have no problem to access my Nextcloud via Firefox or the Android application but I can’t get Nautilus to mount the directory under Ubuntu 18.04. I see the GNOME “online accounts” connects successfully (after accepting to ignore the self-signed certificate warning) but trying to mount the online directory always lead to the errors “HTTP Error: Unacceptable TLS certificate” or “HTTP Error: Found” via the GUI.

I read the documentation at https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/stable/user_manual/files/access_webdav.html and tried to mount manually to better understand what is happening but I get the same problem:

gio mount davs://<ip>/nextcloud/remote.php/dav/files/<username>/

returns the error:

HTTP Error: Unacceptable TLS certificate

and

mount -t davfs https://<ip>/nextcloud/remote.php/dav/files/<username>/ <mount_point>

returns the error:

/sbin/mount.davfs: Mounting failed.
302 Found

While it works perfectly if I just strip the “s” from the commands (like gio mount dav://<ip>/nextcloud/remote.php/dav/files/<username>/ or mount -t davfs http://<ip>/nextcloud/remote.php/dav/files/<username>/ <mount_point>)

Do you know how to mount the directory with SSL? I guess this is more a GNOME / Ubuntu problem but I thought many people would have the same problem here. I know there is a linux client for Nextcloud but I would like the use a pure webdav solution

Thanks for any help!

#2

I do mount it via UI and have no error seen, but I have valid signed Certificate from Let’s Encrypt for my domain (not direct IP address connection).

#3

Make sure that your self signed certificate of the remote server can be verified correctly on that server and make sure that it contains the used ip address. I personally prefer to use FQDN which require a working local DNS server.

#4

Hello,

about accepting the self-signed certificate:

  • using the “add Nextcloud online account” which creates a “davs://” bookmark in Nautilus, I can just ignore the self-signed certificate warning message

  • using the “davfs” mount, I can just copy the Apache certificate of the Nexcloud server (/etc/ssl/certs/ssl-cert-snakeoil.pem in my case) on the client and link it with the “trust_server_cert” option in /etc/davfs2/davfs2.conf

But I discovered the source of the problem. The path is different if I access it with or without encryption.

  • without encryption, the path is <protocol>://<ip>/nextcloud/remote.php/dav/files/<username>

  • without encryption, the path is <protocol>://<ip>/remote.php/dav/files/<username>

As you can see, the subdirectory “nextcloud” is skipped if using davs or https, which is in contradiction with the documentation at https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/20/user_manual/en/files/access_webdav.html

I thought it could be a specificity from the appliance I downloaded from https://www.hanssonit.se/nextcloud-vm but I see both /etc/apache2/sites-available/nextcloud_http_domain_self_signed.conf and /etc/apache2/sites-available/nextcloud_tls_domain_self_signed.conf have the same DocumentRoot /var/www/nextcloud option… Also, I just realized the “add Nextcloud online account” approach on Ubuntu 20.04 now automatically creates the correct bookmark path, pointing to davs://<user>@<ip>/remote.php/webdav

So the documentation might be incorrect after all.

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