With smb1 unix extensions gone, any way to export existing symlinks to Linux clients as symlinks?

Dear all,

I recently toyed with samba as an option to handle exporting files to
clients without root privileges on the server. Particularily, this is
about mounting a certain FUSE fs in a user mount namespace and
exporting that fs via smbd running in the same namespace, using an
unprivileged port. This is a public read-only share for everyone using
guest access, so no need for any user mapping.

I got that working, basically, but except for one issue: The FUSE fs
contains symlinks that need to be re-exported as symlinks to the
clients. The clients need to be able to readlink and explicitly work
with the link targets instead of the SMB server following them.

Now this used to work with smb1 + unix extensions, IMHO … I got
symlinks on the server, the smbd just passes them on (does _not_ follow
them, for security reasons, of course).

But this has been deprecated because somehow the spectre of clients
possibly creating links that the server then follows and possibly
exposes files outside the configured scope of the share was too scary
and not deemed to be possible to handle safely, I presume.

The new style with SMB3 is emulated symlinks with special files on the
server (mfsymlinks), right? Does this really mean that there is no way
for me to export existing Unix symlinks with samba? Would I need
another layer of FUSE to translate actual symlinks to the mfsymlinks
files?

I guess I'll have to do it 'properly' and set up NFS-Ganesha (which
even used to support FUSE directly, but has deprecated that option
recently:-/) but had hoped for Samba being a relatively simple option
for this world-read-only export.

Or is there some sane way to get read-only 'real' symlinks exported to
clients with current samba?


Alrighty then,

Thomas

-- 
Dr. Thomas Orgis
HPC @ Universität Hamburg

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