I wanted to set up file sharing between two machines running Gnome 42 on my local network.
I activated it in the settings on both computers, and tried to connect using the address shown in the configuration (dav://hostname). It didn’t work, and after various error messages and internet searches I randomly searched my systemd services for something with “dav” in it. I then found out that the spice-webdavd service was not started, and starting it fixed the issue.
I think there should be some sort of feedback if this service is not enabled, since it looks to the user as if everything is working as intended. What could I do to implement a warning, or some fix that starts the service somehow?
The file sharing configured by gnome-control-center does not use spice-webdavd, it uses the Apache httpd. This httpd is run as user and does not have a fixed port, so you need to use DNS-SD on the client to discover the port for the .local hostname. Maybe you are trying to connect from a distro that does not have Avahi set up by default, such as Arch. Those distros won’t work with DNS-SD unless you manually set up Avahi.
Thanks for the thorough response! I forgot to add that I am using an Arch system, and ahavi-daemon started because it’s a dependency of spice-webdavd.
So my question is, what would be the best way to solve this? Could some gnome Arch package enable Avahi? Or should gnome-control-center tell the user that Avahi is not started?