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

Ralph Boehme via samba <[email protected]> Mon, 27 Apr 2026 16:05:05 +0200

Newsgroups	gmane.network.samba.general
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

On 4/27/26 2:59 PM, Dr. Thomas Orgis wrote:
> Am Mon, 27 Apr 2026 11:46:09 +0200
> schrieb Ralph Boehme <[email protected]>:
> 
>> On 4/27/26 10:34 AM, Dr. Thomas Orgis via samba wrote:
>>> Or is there some sane way to get read-only 'real' symlinks exported to
>>> clients with current samba?
>>
>> this should just work. Existing symlinks on the server should be seen as
>> symlinks by the client (via reparse points on the wire).
> 
> Oh? That would be cool. This means I'm doing something wrong.

maybe just too old version of Samba and/or kernel. It works here with 
Samba master and kernel 6.17. Samba versions starting with 4.24 should 
be fine. Older kernels had issue.

root@inti:/home/slow# grep '\[test\]' -A2 /opt/samba/etc/smb.conf
[test]
     path = /srv/samba/test

root@inti:/home/slow# ls -l /srv/samba/test/posix/
total 4
crw-r--r--. 1 root root 1, 2 28. Mär 16:24 char
-rw-r--r--. 1 slow slow    0 27. Apr 15:45 file
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 slow slow   26 27. Apr 15:45 link -> 
/srv/samba/test/posix/file

POSIX should be automatically negotiated between client and server if 
the client requests it with -o posix.

root@inti:/home/slow# mount.cifs //localhost/test /mnt/foo/ -o 
username=slow,password=x,posix

root@inti:/home/slow# ls -l /mnt/foo/posix/
total 4
crw-r--r--. 1 root root 1, 2 28. Mär 16:24 char
-rw-r--r--. 1 root slow    0 27. Apr 15:45 file
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root slow    4 27. Apr 15:45 link -> file


> I did not have an option pertaining to that in smb.conf, as the
> documentation / info I could find did not suggest that this kind of
> read-only symlinks works. Specifically
> 
> follow symlinks (S)
> 
>      This parameter allows the Samba administrator to stop smbd(8) from
>      following symbolic links in a particular share. Setting this
>      parameter to no prevents any file or directory that is a symbolic
>      link from being followed (the user will get an error). This option
>      is very useful to stop users from adding a symbolic link to
>      /etc/passwd in their home directory for instance. However it will
>      slow filename lookups down slightly.

Iirc this is basically ignored when POSIX is negotiated.

-slow

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