CIFS VFS and symbolic links

Steven French sfrench at us.ibm.com
Mon Aug 4 18:06:00 GMT 2003





Symbolic links are supported with the cifs vfs but only to servers, such as
Samba (versions greater than about 2.2.5), that support the "CIFS Unix
Extensions."   For security reasons Samba does not support symbolic links
with absolute paths though (only relative paths, not paths beginning with
/).  Samba does this to avoid security exposures due to links created with
a symlink aware client (like mine or smbfs) being autotraversed on the
server side (rather than autotraversed on the clients name space) on behalf
of non-symlink aware clients such as Windows.

Pseudo-files such as sockets are supported with the cifs vfs starting
around version 0.84 or 0.85 but require Samba to be configured for mknod
support (which is off by default).  It also appears to require a mknod
exit.

Your goal of getting a KDE home directory to work on the cifs vfs is
probably not that far off if I can emulate the mknod information (for
socket pseudofiles etc.) via some combination of cifs vfs specific
xattrs/streams/EAs.   I could do symlinks to Windows servers the same way
(treat it as a some combination of xattr/EA/stream)


Steve French
Senior Software Engineer
Linux Technology Center - IBM Austin
phone: 512-838-2294
email: sfrench at-sign us dot ibm dot com




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