How to create a secure WebDAV publishing directory

This step-by-step article describes how to create a secure Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) publishing directory.

Create a WebDAV Publishing Directory

1. On the Microsoft Windows 2000 desktop, click My Computer.
2. In the Inetpub directory, create a physical directory. For example, if you name the directory WebDAV, the path to this directory is C:\Inetpub\WebDAV. You can put this directory anywhere except under the Wwwroot directory. Wwwroot is an exception because its default discretionary access control lists (DACLs) are different from those on other directories.
3. Click Start, click Programs, click Administrative Tools, and then open the Internet Information Services (IIS) snap-in. Click to select the Web site in which you want to create the virtual directory, and then map it to the physical directory that you created in step 2.
4. Type WebDAV as the alias for this virtual directory, and then link it to the physical directory that you created in step 2.
5. Reset the default NTFS file system permissions to something more restrictive. Users need at least Read permissions to see the directory. If users want to upload content, users also need Write permissions.
6. Grant the Read, Write, and Browsing access permissions for the virtual directory from the IIS Microsoft Management Console (MMC). This grants users the right to publish documents on this virtual directory and to see a list of the files in it.
   
   NOTE: Granting Write access does not give a client the ability to modify Active Server Pages (ASP) pages or any other script-mapped files. To allow these files to be modified, you must grant Write permissions and Script source access after you create the virtual directory.

Authentication

1. Set up Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
   290625  (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290625/ ) How to configure SSL in a Windows 2000 IIS 5.0 test environment by using Certificate Server 2.0
2. After you have installed the certificate on the Web server, enable Basic authentication on the WebDAV virtual directory in the IIS MMC:
   1. Click Start, click Programs, and then click Administrative Tools.
   2. Click Internet Information Services. This opens the MMC for IIS.
   3. Locate your WebDAV publishing directory under the Web site that you created. Right-click the directory, and then click Properties.
   4. In the window that appears, click the Directory Security tab. Under Anonymous Access and Authentication Control, click Edit. This opens the Authentication Methods window.
   5. Click to select Basic authentication for the virtual directory. Make sure that nothing except Basic is selected.
   6. Click OK in the next two windows so that the settings take effect.

Troubleshooting

For a user to log on to a server using Basic authentication, their user account needs Log on locally permissions. You can add these permissions from the Local Security Policy.

For more information about WebDAV publishing in IIS 5.0, access the product documentation from your IIS server, or visit the following Microsoft Web site:
More information about WebDAV publishing in IIS 6.0 is available in the product documentation. To view this documentation, visit the following Microsoft Web site: You can also access the product documentation through IIS Manager.

For more information about issues that can occur when you try to open a Web folder that is hosted on IIS, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

For more information about how to access this Help feature, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: