Symbolic link file support.

[Richard Sharpe]

On Tue, Sep 9, 2014 at 9:34 PM, Scott Lovenberg
<scott.lovenberg at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 9, 2014 at 7:14 PM, Hemanth Thummala
> <hemanth.thummala at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Thanks for the confirmation Jeremy!
>>
>> On Tue, Sep 9, 2014 at 5:04 PM, Jeremy Allison <jra at samba.org> wrote:
>>
>>> On Tue, Sep 09, 2014 at 05:01:25PM -0700, Hemanth Thummala wrote:
>>> > Hi Folks,
>>> >
>>> > We are using samba 3.6.12 stack. looks like we are unable to create the
>>> > symbolic links. They failing with status "not a reparse point"
>>> >
>>> > X:\>mklink /D X:\lnk_file X:\FOO\BAR
>>> > The file or directory is not a reparse point.
>>> >
>>> > Packet capture shows that specific IOCTL call is failing
>>> > STATUS_NOT_A_REPARSE_POINT
>>> > error.
>>> >
>>> > 107 3.135447000 x.x.x.x y.y.y.y SMB2 258 Ioctl Request FILE_SYSTEM
>>> > Function:0x0029 File: lnk_file
>>> > 108 3.138991000 y.y.y.y x.x.x.x SMB2 143 Ioctl Response, Error:
>>> > STATUS_NOT_A_REPARSE_POINT
>>> >
>>> > "follow symlinks = yes" is still enabled.
>>> >
>>> > Is there any other options that I need to enable symlink file creation
>>> > support?
>>>
>>> We don't currently support creating reparse points,
>>> there's never been a demand for it.
>>>
>>> Should be an interesting minor project to do it
>>> though :-).
>>>
>
> Hi all,
>
> I actually looked at this a year or two ago.  It's not an unreasonable
> amount of work that has to be done to support reparse points, but it's
> certainly not a trivial amount of work; I had to dig through quite a
> bit of Microsoft documentation just to get a handle on the problem
> space.  You might want to ping Richard Sharpe (I'm CCing him) as he
> was also doing some work on this a while ago, IIRC.

So the issue here is that Samba does support some reparse points.
Well, only one: DFS Referrals, which are actually reparse points.
However, Samba does it by using symbolic links of the form
cifs:something-or-other as I recall.

So, the thing to do would be to create a proper name space and perhaps
use the reparse tag as the name-space name (ie, before the colon.)

-- 
Regards,
Richard Sharpe
(何以解憂？唯有杜康。--曹操)