Permission on a symlinked directory in a Samba share

Question

I have a Samba share of my home directory set up as described here. On my Windows box I can access the share, open files and write to them. The server I am connecting to is an Ubuntu 12.04 VM running on Virtualbox.

In my home directory I have symlinked /var/www to ~/www:

charlesr@hicks:~$ ls -lad www
lrwxrwxrwx 1 charlesr charlesr 8 Jul 16 18:45 www -> /var/www

Even though the symlink is owned by me (charlesr), I cannot access it via Windows:

I've checked permissions on /var/www and that directory is part of the www-data group, which I am a part of:

charlesr@hicks:~$ ls -lad /var/www
drwxrwsr-x 3 root www-data 4096 Jul 16 18:13 /var/www

charlesr@hicks:~$ grep www-data /etc/group
www-data:x:33:charlesr

So what am I missing here? Why can't I access this symlinked directory that my user has permission to read and write to? I'm new to Samba so I'm hoping it's something obvious.

Solution

Samba doesn't like symlinks for security reasons, and won't follow them unless you force it. Try adding

wide links = yes
unix extensions = no
follow symlinks = yes

to your smb.conf [GLOBAL] section and restart Samba. follow symlinks should already default to yes, but it won't hurt to set it again.

Comments

[Charles Roper]

Thank you, that was it. I wanted to understand what these settings meant so a bit of searching yielded this helpful page from the manual: samba.org/samba/docs/using_samba/ch08.html

[Billy Moon]

I am having the same issue, and on ubuntu server 10.10 this solves it for me, but on 12.04 the issue is persisting. My symlinks appear as unnavigable items like before I added the wide links = yes setting (to both the [global] section and [homes] section just to be sure). Any further ideas or places I can look to solve this?

[charlesbridge]

Did you sudo service smbd restart after the changes? I just tried it on Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS and it still works for me.

[Jake Wilson]

One note about this, it appears that unix extensions = yes HAS to be set in [GLOBAL]. It cannot be set only for an individual share. wide links and follow symlinks can be set only for individual shares just fine however.