Day in, day out…

If you use Weave, you’ve probably noticed that Mozilla servers are currently overloaded. Accounts are not working. My account authenticates (If I access

https://services.mozilla.com/user/<user_name>/

it asks for and accepts my credentials), but I get a “Not Found” 404 error. The accounts that do work, are very slow.

Like always, I went forumming, trying to get to the bottom of this trouble. I came across some helpful posts at the Weave forums. Posts from covidium and netoak are especially useful. This post is just a compilation of steps I followed to get my Weave working again.

Get a WebDAV host
I guess there are only a handful of these, that are free. I tried to find one in the US, but couldn’t. I just used the one that covidium suggested. I opened a free account at myDisk.se.

Create directory structure
Weave expects the files to be in a specific directory structure. If you have myserver.com as your server, it will look for

myserver.com/user/user_name

To cater to this, I created a directory called user, then inside it, I created one called user_name.

In retrospect, I should have instead made

weave/user/user_name

directory structure. That would keep everything Weave together.

Set Weave’s Server Settings
Open Weave’s Server Settings (Tools -> Weave -> Preferences…) and then go to the Advanced tab. Replace the default Server Location with

https://mydisk.se/user_name/

mydisk makes my files available at https://mydisk.se/user_name/, other hosts may use some other path.

If I had used

weave/user/user_name

directory structure, I would set the Server Location to

https://mydisk.se/user_name/weave/

Try Weave again
In Weave preferences’ Advanced tab, click on the Advanced… button. Click on Reset Login and Reset Server Lock buttons. I did not think it would be required, but I had to quit Firefox and restart it.

Now, sign in to Weave again (Tools -> Weave -> Sign In). Follow the setup wizard as if you are opening a new account. Use username and password from your WebDAV server. Pick a strong passphrase.

At this point, you should be all set.

Do leave feedback to point out errors in the above process, so other readers can benefit too.

My current web host does not provide WebDAV. From what I read, DreamHost does. I wonder if Weave users who have DreamHost accounts already host their own Weave servers.