deletion of symlinks from Windows Clients

[Peter Samuelson]

[Michael Marschall]
> I would like to use symlinks to give my users access to all folders
> they need right from their home directory. I create the symlinks as
> root and they cannot delete the symlink in their home directory from
> windows.  However when they try to delete the folder (ie highlight it
> and hit the delete key from windows)

Why on earth would they do that?  (Or are you asking yourself the same
question?)

> the contents of the folder is deleteable (if they have write access
> to the folder) even though the symlink is not deleteable. I need
> these users to have write access to many of these folders. It seems
> that Windows wants to recursively delete the contents of the
> symlinked folder and then delete the folder; which is Window's
> default behavior for deleteing a folder but not UNIX's in regard to
> symlinks. Does anybody know of a way around this. I guess I just want
> to avoid the casual deletion of an smylinked folder by one of my
> users.

Your message is very confusing, at least to me.  If the user highlights 
the folder and hits `delete', what do you *really* want to happen?

* folder is deleted
* contents of folder are deleted, folder itself remains
* contents of folder that are owned by the user are deleted, other
  people's files remain
* symlink is deleted, folder is still there but inaccessible
* nothing happens because it was probably a mistake

The first two should be easy enough with proper ownerships/permissions.
The third requires the `sticky' bit on the Unix directory (chmod 1777).
The last two are probably not possible.

Peter