[CalendarServer-users] several questions on Calendarservice (on Debian) V.1.2.dfsg-8

[Jochen Grotepass]

Hello List,
please apologize for questions that might have been answered already. I
read thru the list until August 2008 and did not find answers to my
questions below.

Upfront some information on what I try to archive and what we have...

More than three years ago we went away from Exchange into a more
multi-OS solution. We have different sort of OS - namely OSX (10.5.x),
Debian (Sidux), Windows (XP). Our internal Calendarserver is right now a
DavICal (formerly RSCDS) setup running on a Debian server. As one of the
Mac users I was always looking into the progress of Calendarserver. We
were now asked by some small companies and non-profit organization to
provide Email and Calenderservice. Thats when I realized that meanwhile
Debian has the Calendarserver Package. So I give it a try and installed
it. Playing a bit arround I found it working. Right now, I use the
XML-based accounts structure because the nss-ldap based implementation
had too many issues related to our naming structure. Creating the
accounts.xml automagically from the ldap directory for our users is a
pretty easy task (except the Password ;) ) - so I gave that solution the
first try.

Here now my questions:

1. Multidomain Calserver
Based on the service we were asked for, we setup the Email service for
an multi-domain scenario. Start to think how the Calendarserver might
work with it, started the first questions. As far as I understand from
the mailing list and some other internet sources, the caldavd.plist
defines the location of the calendar files in the "DocumentRoot" Tag.
Because I wanted to seperate the principals based on their domain to
prevent security side effects I have had no idea at the first sight. So
I thought about to setup different servers listening on different ports
and use an apache reverse proxy to point to the propper service.
Q: Is this a feasible plan or does anybody here has a better solution?

2. Permissions
I have read that giving read-permissions on user/group based calendars
is a task that the client software should provide. We use currently
Lightning (still 0.9 because of Thunderbird 2) and I have no chance to
provide any permissions using this client.
Q: Is there any command-line based tool that I can use? - If so, I would
create an admin/user Interface to provide the permissions dialogue.

3. Authentication
As of now, I used the Digest Authentication (not sure if Lightning
provides Kerberos Authentication). Every hour I got requested to provide
a new Login via Lightning. As far as I have read thru the list, I knew
that Lightning might not be the best solution because of still open bugs
in the CalDav implementation. However the error I can see in the error
log says that the "nonce value is invalid". Searching through google I
have not found a solution yet.
Q: Does anybody have a clue on these messages:
2009-04-28 13:44:11+0200 [-] [caldav-8008]  [HTTPChannel,240,127.0.0.1]
'Authentication failed: Digest credentials expired'
2009-04-28 13:44:11+0200 [-] [caldav-8008]  [HTTPChannel,241,127.0.0.1]
PROPFIND /calendars/groups/Familie/calendar/ HTTP/1.1
2009-04-28 13:44:11+0200 [-] [caldav-8008]  [HTTPChannel,241,127.0.0.1]
'Authentication failed: Invalid nonce value: 19270429311356917781566817204'

4. iCal Client Error
Because I wanted to play with the item 2 (Permissions) I tried to use
the iCal client on my mac. Unfortunately I got an error that blocks me
from creating that Calendar in iCal. The Error Message
"Bei der Anfrage ist ein unerwarteter Fehler aufgetreten (Domain „CalDAV
No Calendar Home Error“/Fehler 1)." (sorry for the German message) -
keeps me away from testing with iCal. I checked in the access log and
the error log and cannot see any difference in the path to the Lightnng
URL.
Q: Can somebody give me a hint what this error mean?

Sorry for the long list of questions. I would really like to use this
package if I could see a clear path to solve my current issues/challenges...

Thanks for any advice or hint that helps me to solve those questions...

Jochen