As some of you may be aware, the new version of cPanel (version 11) now supports a technology called “WebDav” (known as “Web Disks” within cPanel).
Basically this allows you to setup your cPanel web hosting account as an additional drive on your machine – making the uploading and publishing of files a lot easier.
However, server administrators will first need to enable the TCP ports 2077 and 2078 in and outbound for this to work correctly (don’t forget to restart/reload the firewall). Once that’s done, your customers should be able to login to their cPanel control panel and either select the new fancy “Getting Started” wizard or “Web Disks->Access Web Disk” to setup a link.
Using cPanel’s handy “Auto configuration” tool is useful – but you may hit the same problem I did when I downloaded the installer .vbs file to my Windows XP machine via Firefox. Attempting to open the file came up with the error “Windows Script Host access is disabled on this machine. Contact your administrator for details”. Needless to say – I am the administrator and if I’ve disabled something like that in the past, it’s probably for a very good reason!
So – how can we manually configure cPanel’s WebDav uploading tool manually if the automatic method fails?….
Manual Secure Method
This is the recommended method and will encrypted your login details and your data as it passes to and from your machine to the server. However, you will need to accept a few security warnings.
- First access the “My Network Places” option on your Windows machine (it’ll probably show up on your desktop somewhere).
- Then click “Add Network Place”
- Click “Next” and it should ask “Where do you want to create this network place?” and provide you with (most probably) a single option labelled “Choose another network location”. Select that option and click Next.
- In the “Internet or network address” box enter “
https://www.example.com:2078/” (where example.com is your domain name) and click Next - You may receive a pop up security alert saying “This page requires a secure connection which includes server authentication. The certificate issuer for this site is untrusted or unknown. Do you wish to proceeed?” – click Yes. Basically this means that whilst the connection is encrypted, your computer cannot automatically detect that the server you are connecting to is who it is claming to be for the encryption (but all we care about is that our data is being encrypted).
- You may then receive another pop up security alert saying “A secure connection with this site cannot be verified. Would you still like to proceed? The certificate you are viewing does not match the name of the site you are trying to view”. Again, just click Yes
- It’ll then ask you to login – just use your cPanel login details.
- Add a name for the location and click Next
- Now if you go to “My Network Places” and click on the icon (and approve the security alerts and maybe login again), you’ll be able to access all your web files as if they were on your hard drive.
Manual Insecure Method
If you don’t mind your login details being sent in “plain text” across the internet and would prefer to skip the security warnings, then follow these steps:
- First access the “My Network Places” option on your Windows machine (it’ll probably show up on your desktop somewhere).
- Then click “Add Network Place”
- Click “Next” and it should ask “Where do you want to create this network place?” and provide you with (most probably) a single option labelled “Choose another network location”. Select that option and click Next.
- In the “Internet or network address” box enter “
http://www.example.com:2077/” (where example.com is your domain name) and click Next - It’ll then ask you to login – just use your cPanel login details.
- Add a name for the location and click Next
- Now if you go to “My Network Places” and click on the icon (and maybe login again), you’ll be able to access all your web files as if they were on your hard drive.
Hope it helps!