Just-in-time mounts when following symlinks

[Albert Chin-A-Young]

This mail message follows from several discussions with Luke Leighton.
It's mostly technical in nature but I'm submitting to all mailing
lists anyway (Luke's suggestion).

We have our Samba server running with the Berkeley AMD automounter
(nothing peculiar here). In order for our Samba users to walk the
automount tree, we created a program to create symbolic links from
the local filesystem to the automounter keys. So, we have a tree
that looks like the following:

	/amdlinks
	    d418		(tree created from amd.d418 map)
		PS2MIF -> /d418/PS2MIF
		adm -> /d418/adm
		bin -> /d418/bin
	    da
		abt		(tree created from amd.da.abt map)
		    dist
			nosw -> /da/abt/dist/nosw
			sw -> /da/abt/dist/sw
		adm		(tree created from amd.da.adm map)
		    dist
			sys -> /da/adm/dist/sys

So, the user, using the File Manager/Explorer in windows, can
map to \\samba\da or \\samba\d418 and walk the /amdlinks/da or
/amdlinks/d418 tree and see all the directories that the automounter
*might* mount (if we didn't do it this way, \\samba\da would map
to the automounter /da directory which might not contain anything
and this would make it impossible for them to "point-and-click"
their way down the directory tree).

The problem occurs when users descend into a directory with a list
of symbolic links (such as \\samba\d418 above). When you descend
into this directory, the Samba server will kick off the automounter
in this directory and mount everything in /d418. This becomes a big
problem when there are *many* symbolic links in a directory pointing
to autmounted paths (which would then cause lots of NFS mount). So,
what I would like is a "just in time links" option that returns the
symbolic link to the File Manager and, not until the user "double
clicks" on an entry that is a symbolic link, have it followed
(and thus kick off the automounter on an "as-needed" basis).

Mucking with 'follow symlinks' doesn't help at all. Setting this to
'no' still causes the flood of mounts described above. The reason
for this is that only when you "double click" on the file which is a
link is an lstat() call made. However, when you access \\samba\d418
above, stat() calls are done on the links which cause the mount. What
I need is a simple addition where 'follow symlinks = yes' but a
symbolic link is *ONLY* followed when a user "double clicks" on the
file from the file manager (dunno how else to describe this). So,
lstat() on one hand and stat() on the other.

We are prepared to pay for this change but I need to know if it's
possible. Also, the Samba server is running 1.9.18p7 on a Solaris
2.5.1 box.

--
albert chin (china at pprd.abbott.com)