symbolic links, samba and cifs [solved]

[gr0x0rd]

Hello all,

I've run a samba server for years, and usually connecte to it via windows clients. I have a number of hard disks in my desktop machine that I mount to /usr/storage/x and then access from a folder in my home directory using symbolic links. The folder containing these symlinks is also the root of my samba share. For windows clients, these symlinks are viewed as folders, and the contents of these drives can be easily seen.

The other day I got fed up with windows on my notebook and put gentoo on it. But, after mounting my samba share via cifs, I found that the symlinked hard disks (or any other symlinks on the remote filesystem) no longer functioned after the mount: the client machine treats them as symlinks to a location with the local filesystem, rather than on the host filesystem.

... Update!

From the ubuntu forums, put the following in the general section of your smb.conf:

[Raniz]

For mounting linux shares on a linux computer you're better off using NFS.

http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/NFS

This will cause your symlink issue to arise again, but that can be fixed by replacing the symlinks with directories and mounting the destinations inside them with mount -o bind source link, you'll need to make sure this is run after boot though. I don't know if it can be placed in fstab or if you need to do it in the local init-scripts.