I recently got one of the Free Lifetime 50GB accounts that Box.net is giving away and I wanted to be able to efficiently use that account on Ubuntu without having to access their website. As such I figured why not use WebDAV which Box.net supports and which I have used to mount folders on my own servers before.
There are a handful of guides now on how to mount box.net however they lack the proper instructions to make a secure connection as such your username and password are passed in plaintext. I think I have found a way around this and below are the simple steps to get going.
First thing you want to do is open a Terminal window and install davfs2:
sudo apt-get install davfs2
Next thing you want to do is create the mount directory:
sudo mkdir /media/box.net
Next go ahead and mount:
mount -t davfs https://www.box.net/dav /media/box.net (Note: The HTTPS should create a secure connection so your authentication will be safe)
Add your username and password:
sudo nano /etc/davfs2/secrets
echo “https://www.box.net/dav username password” >> /etc/davfs2/secrets
Notably you can access Box.net via Nautilus using WebDAV:
Just use Connect to Server to dav://www.box.net/dav and make sure to select Secure WebDAV.
Note: These instructions should work fine with previous releases of Ubuntu and also on Debian.