[Samba] Massive confusion with samba mounting

[Aaron Hawryluk]

Hi,

I have a dilemma - here's some background:

Up until recently, a series of local scripts that run on our network ran on
a Mac OS X box. I would like to migrate these scripts to a Fedora Core 4 box
(for better perl, ruby,and pythoiin support), however, the scripts use
directories in the Appleshare network.

I have the /Volumes directory, in which OSX mounts the shares, shared via
Windows Sharing on the Mac OS X box (which is essentially samba compiled for
Mach, I believe). When I mount this share from a windows machine as a shared
netowrk drive, everything functions properly and I can view all the files on
the appleshare network from my windows pc. The link to the /Volumes area on
the mac system is accomplished via a symbolic link in the user's home
directory pointing to the /Volumes directory located at the system root.

However, when I try to mount this samba share on linux, the Volumes symbolic
link is interpreted literally - that is, I actually see a symbolic link to
/Volumes, which of course does not exist on the linux box.  Is there any way
to make linux see this in the same way Windows does, as a hard link that
actually leads to the folder/path on the Mac machine?

I realize it's a bit of a convoluted way of doing things, but it's
definitely not possible to mount the Appleshares directly on the linux box -
apparently there used to be a product called afpfs, but it is no longer
maintained.  If I do an nfs mount from the Mac /Volumes folder to the linux
box, all the appleshares show up as folders that are empty except for a
single file called .appleshared or some such, so that's a non-starter as
well.

One thing I have just checked - if I actually browse the smb server with
smbclient, everything works - I can drill down through the appleshares no
problem.  So this may be more of an issue with mount -t smbfs than with the
samba protocol itself.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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Aaron Hawryluk
Webmaster, The Calgary Sun
webmaster at calgarysun.com
http://www.calgarysun.com
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