[linux-cifs-client] Mounting windows share: support for symbolic links

[marcin.kot]

Hello,

I am part of a team that currently works on a project with integration 
of linux clients in a windows environment with Active Directory. The 
distribution is Debian Edu 3.0 (based on Etch) with kernel 2.6.18. We 
are testing if it is possible to use mount.cifs for home directory mounts.

CIFS might work well for this purpose, but we have a problem with 
symlinks. It seems that windows does not support symlinks properly, at 
least not the unix type.

We have done some tests against a Windows 2003 R2 server, and 
applications like the KDE-environment tend to fail. It is probably not 
an option to take into account what applications use symlinks in their 
configuration files/directories.

We are not really sure if it is possible to use symlinks in a windows 
environment at all. What we think is that currently:

- Symlinks do not work on a mounted windows share, even if SFU (Services 
For Unix) are installed. We are not sure if it is possible to create sfu 
symlinks on the client. Specifiying the sfu option when using mount.cifs 
makes no difference?

- Vista supports some kind of symlinks (and has a mklink utility), but 
we are not sure if that kind of symlinks are supported across the 
network or even implemented in CIFS.

- It is mentioned that the SMB2 protocol adds support for symlinks, but 
does it work, or is it currently possible to test SMB2 support with cifs?

- Symlinks work when the share is on a Samba server with unix extensions 
enabled.

We have also tested symlinks with the built-in NFS service in Windows 
2003 R2. Symlinks created here are part of the Interix-subsystem. This 
of course requires the NFS-service to be installed in addition and it 
would be nice to avoid it.

Essentially the question is if it is possible at all to make symlinks 
work on a windows share with CIFS and hopefully shed som light on if our 
assumptions are correct.

With kind regards,
Martin Kot