[Samba] Symlinks followed literally in Debian 3.0, not in Red Hat 7.3

[Stephen D. Benning]

Hi all,

I've encountered a problem in using Samba 3.0.4.  I've got a Red Hat 7.3
box (johnboy) running as a domain controller, and we've got symlinks to
a bunch of NFS mounts on a different machine (pawalton) to give people
the necessary file access using only one SMB mount.  For example, the
SMB share is under /smbfiles in the root directory of the Samba server. 
Within /smbfiles, there are three symlinks.

/smbfiles/share1 points to /mounts/pawalton/hda/root/files
/smbfiles/share2 points to /mounts/pawalton/hdb/user_files
/smbfiles/share3 points to /mounts/pawalton/hdb/admin_files

I use an ssh tunnel to forward the smb port on johnboy to my local
machine (doublemint), and the port forwards quite nicely.  I can get
access to my files using smbclient.  However, when I try to mount
/smbfiles from johnboy onto the mountpoint I've created on doublemint
(/shares/johnboy) with smbmount, it creates three broken symlinks that
act as if they're trying to point to the locations of the files on
johnboy!

share1 -> /mounts/pawalton/hda/root/files
share2 -> /mounts/pawalton/hdb/user_files
share3 -> /mounts/pawalton/hdb/admin_files

I've Googled around, read the documentation, and futzed with this for
about three days straight now, and I can't get smbmount to just mount
the directories (as my other Red Hat 7.3 box does, with no problems).
I've also tried reinstalling Samba 3.0.4 on doublemint, to no avail. 
The "follow symlinks" option in smb.conf is set to yes.  Is this a
peculiarity to Debian, or is this a bug that's more generally known? 
I'd like to be able to mount these directories, rather than their
symlinks.

Stephen
-- 
Stephen D. Benning
Office: N631 Elliott Hall
75 East River Road
Minneapolis, MN  55455
E-mail: benn0224 at umn.edu