troubles with webdav

david.f.driscoll
Hi, I know you guys don't report on individual webdav servers, but I've been killing myself over this the last few days and thought I'd at least ask.

I'm running Zotero on Firefox 27 on OS X Mavericks, attempting to sync with my personal server running Ubuntu 12.04 and Apache 2.2 with webdav enabled. I think I've set up webdav correctly -- no other clients have had any troubles connecting, and litmus (http://www.webdav.org/neon/litmus/) gives me the green light.

Zotero has had real difficulties though. I've gotten it to sync partially at least twice before it stops working, when about half my files have been uploaded. More often it seems to hang at the options or propfind request when I'm trying to "verify server." My apache log suggests that the options or propfind is successful (200 or 207), but Zotero just idles there.

I'd really appreciate any help you can give. As an example I've sent you my debug id at D1862650771, where it hangs at the propfind request. For this particular request the relevant section of the apache logs are (i've removed my ip address):

9x.2xx.1xx.1xx - david [08/Mar/2014:17:38:35 -0800] "OPTIONS /webdav/zotero/ HTTP/1.1" 200 357 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:27.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/27.0"
9x.2xx.1xx.1xx - david [08/Mar/2014:17:38:35 -0800] "PROPFIND /webdav/zotero/ HTTP/1.1" 207 462 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:27.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/27.0"
  • dstillman
    edited March 8, 2014
    That's bizarre. That shouldn't happen unless the response isn't actually making it back to Zotero. Is there a proxy in between? Can you use ngrep on your machine to see if there's actually a response? (I'm not sure how it would get logged by Apache if not, at least if there's not a proxy, but I don't think we've seen this before.)
  • dstillman
    (tcpdump might suffice if that's easier. ngrep is in homebrew.)
  • david.f.driscoll
    edited March 9, 2014
    Thanks so much for your quick reply, Dan.

    No proxy in between; I've used ngrep to see if the packets are arriving, and it looks like they are.

    Here's one instance where the OPTIONS request packet is returned but not detected by Zotero. The debug id is D423445507; I've supplied the relevant portion of ngrep below (using sudo ngrep -l -d en0 "" port 80).

    I really have no idea what might be going on -- is this a problem with Firefox's handling of webdav?

    T 192.168.1.8:53260 -> 128.12.131.18:80 [A]
    OPTIONS /webdav/zotero/ HTTP/1.1..Host: polyphemus.stanford.edu..User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.9; rv:27.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/27.0..Accept: text/html,application/xh
    tml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8..Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5..Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate..DNT: 1.. [additional output removed — D.S.]
    #####
    T 128.12.131.18:80 -> 192.168.1.8:53260 [AP]
    HTTP/1.1 200 OK..Date: Sun, 09 Mar 2014 07:32:21 GMT..Server: Apache/2.2.22 (Ubuntu)..DAV: 1,2..DAV: <http://apache.org/dav/propset/fs/1>..MS-Author-Via: DAV..Allow: OPTIONS,GET,HEAD,POST,DELE
    TE,TRACE,PROPFIND,PROPPATCH,COPY,MOVE,LOCK,UNLOCK..Content-Length: 0..Keep-Alive: timeout=60, max=99..Connection: Keep-Alive..Content-Type: httpd/unix-directory....
  • dstillman
    That certainly does seem to be a response. Are you running any other Firefox extensions, and if so have you tried disabling them all? Are you running any security software?

    There's really not a whole lot going on in the code here — as soon as it gets a response back it should log the output, and it's neither doing that nor throwing an error. Since I don't think we've ever seen this before, it seems like this has to be specific to your system somehow.

    Have you tried Zotero Standalone? It'll share your existing data directory by default, so it's easy to test.
  • david.f.driscoll
    Thanks for editing my ngrep request -- you can see that I know just enough to get myself in a bunch of trouble.

    I've tried disabling my other Firefox extensions and even resetting firefox with just zotero running -- no luck. As for other software, I'm running Sophos antivirus, Seafile, Dropbox, but I can't imagine they're the culprit. You're probably right that it is something specific to my computer, but I have no idea what.

    Zotero Standalone works perfectly, actually. The problem is just Zotero in Firefox. I've beaten my head against this long enough. Since Zotero standalone seems to work, I'll just use that from now on, even if it's not quite as full featured as the browser add-on. Thanks so much for your help -- I greatly appreciate it.
  • adamsmith
    I mean - you can just use both: Use Firefox while searching/importing, then switch to Standalone for organizing (and to finish the file sync)
  • david.f.driscoll
    Great, I'll do that then. Thanks so much for all your quick responses!

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