Using CIFS to mount a Windows share that symlinks another Windows share

Question

I have a Windows Server 2008 VM that hosts some files that are accessed by a mixture of Windows and Linux (Ubuntu 12.04) machines via a windows share. Due to space constraints on the VM host that the Sever 2008 machine, we want to move some of the older data that is infrequently accessed to a second host.

I copied the data over and set up a windows share on host 2. I then symlinked the old folder on host 1 to the UNC path for its new home on host 2. Now when I got to the host 1 share on a Windows machine, I can see the symlinked files as if they'd never moved (provided the client has enabled Remote to Remote symlinks as instructed here). However on the linux machines, I cannot persuade CIFS to follow the symlinks.

Am I missing something? Is this even possible?

Solution

Unmount the share and issue this on the linux machine: echo 0 > /proc/fs/cifs/LinuxExtensionsEnabled

Remount and the symlinks should appear. It appears to be a bug.

Comments

[Frank Thomas]

If I'm understanding correct (that your samba server is the one hosting the share with teh symlink in it) make sure your smb.conf contains followsymlinks yes

[Steve Reeder]

nice find! never would have guessed that one

[Freaky Dug]

It doesn't seem to work for me, I still get ls: reading directory cifs2/remote/: Operation not supported after remounting.

[PMat]

this did not work