[Samba] samba and writing through hard/symbolic links

[John H Terpstra]

On Wed, 5 Feb 2003, Francis Vierboom wrote:

> hi everyone,
>
> i feel like this problem should have come up a thousand times before but can't seem to find anything
> about on google. i am no expert and i don't know much samba lingo but i hope you understand me.
>
> If you open a symlink (or hard link for that matter) in windows (2000) over samba, say a blah.doc
> file, which looks like
>
> -rw-rw-r--   1 francis  galexia  2567 Feb  5 12:33 blah.doc > /somewhere/blah.doc
>
> Then if you make changes to it in Word, and then save it, when you go back to the directory there
> will be
>
> -rw-rw-r--   1 francis  galexia  2980 Feb  5 12:35 blah.doc
> -rw-rw-r--   1 francis  galexia  2567 Feb  5 12:33 blah.doc.bak > /somewhere/blah.doc
>
> ie samba has created a new *regular* file,
     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I am NOT convinced that this assertion is valid. I accept that is what
samba delivered, but what samba did was to follow very precisely the
instructions given by your MS Windows software.

> and relegated the old (and unaltered) link to a .bak file,
> leaving the source file of the link unchanged.

That may well be the inescapable result of the instructions your software
client gave.

> Is there a way to make samba follow the link when you save things as well?

Are you SURE samba did this?

Suggest you set the samba loglevel=5 and repeat the exercise. Then check
the log file to see what instructions samba executed. Then ask yourself -
what should samba have done with the instructions it was given. Then if
you havea good suggestion in how to "solve" the problem please let us
know.

- John T.
-- 
John H Terpstra
Email: jht at samba.org