Mounting MobileMe iDisk Using WebDav and Linux

Chris Danielson — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:39:07 +0000

Anyone have a MobileMe account and wondered if you can access the iDisk from a mount command in your Linux environment? It’s handy for backing up your data and general file sharing.

This simple step by step process will allow you to gain read and write access to your MobileMe user account’s iDisk drive space. The first pre-cursor you need to fulfill is that you need the davfs (on debian/ubuntu flavors just run: apt-get install davfs2) package installed.

Next we’re going to create a mount point that will be used as a point of reference for the iDisk drive.

View Code BASH

sudo mkdir /mnt/idisk

Using the root user account, modify your /etc/fstab file by adding the following at the bottom. Just change the {account_name} section below:

https://idisk.mac.com/{account_name}    /mnt/idisk      davfs   rw,noauto,user  0       0

Now that you’ve completed the modification of the mount. Let’s run a test.

View Code BASH

mydev:/mnt# mount /mnt/idisk
 
Please enter the username to authenticate with server
  https://idisk.mac.com/{acccount_name}
or hit enter for none.
Username: {acccount_name}
 
Please enter the password to authenticate {acccount_name} with server
  https://idisk.me.com/{acccount_name}
or hit enter for none.
Password:
mydev:/mnt# ls -al /mnt/idisk
total 11
drwxr-xr-x 15 root root  256 2009-08-13 08:11 .
drwxr-xr-x  4 root root 4096 2009-08-13 07:59 ..
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root   68 2009-06-16 14:33 Backup
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root   36 2009-06-16 14:33 Documents
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root   68 2009-06-17 07:14 Groups
drwxr-xr-x  5 root root  132 2009-07-02 09:11 iPhone Development
drwxr-xr-x  5 root root  100 2009-06-17 07:48 Library
drwx------  2 root root   36 2009-08-13 08:11 lost+found
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root   36 2009-06-16 14:33 Movies
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root   36 2009-06-16 14:33 Music
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root   36 2009-06-16 14:33 Pictures
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root   36 2009-06-17 07:49 Public
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root   36 2009-06-16 14:33 Sites
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root   88 2008-07-10 01:11 Software
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root   52 2009-06-17 07:53 Web

That’s great isn’t it? Now the only trouble is it keeps on prompting you for your username and password. In my situation I want this automated. Luckily for us, davfs has a mechanism built into it for managing this. It’s located in the /etc/davfs2/secrets file. So as the root user run the following commands.

View Code BASH

mydev:/# umount /mnt/idisk
mydev:/# echo "https://idisk.mac.com/{account_name}   {account_name}   {account_password}" >> /etc/davfs2/secrets
mydev:/# mount /mnt/idisk
mydev:/# ls -al /mnt/idisk
total 11
drwxr-xr-x 15 root root  256 2009-08-13 08:11 .
drwxr-xr-x  4 root root 4096 2009-08-13 07:59 ..
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root   68 2009-06-16 14:33 Backup
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root   36 2009-06-16 14:33 Documents
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root   68 2009-06-17 07:14 Groups
drwxr-xr-x  5 root root  132 2009-07-02 09:11 iPhone Development
drwxr-xr-x  5 root root  100 2009-06-17 07:48 Library
drwx------  2 root root   36 2009-08-13 08:11 lost+found
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root   36 2009-06-16 14:33 Movies
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root   36 2009-06-16 14:33 Music
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root   36 2009-06-16 14:33 Pictures
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root   36 2009-06-17 07:49 Public
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root   36 2009-06-16 14:33 Sites
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root   88 2008-07-10 01:11 Software
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root   52 2009-06-17 07:53 Web
mydev:/# umount /mnt/idisk

And that is it! No more prompting for the username and password. Pretty simple implementation and we’re off to the races.

EDIT NOTES: Thanks DaveDaveDave for the comment, I changed the https://idisk.me.com to the new and functional https://idisk.mac.com

Chris Danielson's Blog » mount

Mounting MobileMe iDisk Using WebDav and Linux