[Samba] MAC Client - Issue Following Symbolic Links

[Jeffrey Johnson]

I run SAMBA 3.6.15 on a Solaris 10 server that acts as a portal for my MS
Windows users into a large number of UNIX servers providing amongst other
things web-servers and ftp-servers.

The SAMBA server has these varied resources all mounted as NFS mounts.
In each users home directory there are symbolic links that take the users
to their specific resource.

/home/user/web-site -> /web-site
/home/user/ftp-site ->/ftp-site

When a users logins into the Samba server their home directory is
mapped and for my MS-Windows users this works great.

For my half-a-dozen Mac users the Symbolic links all fail and has never
really worked.   I have forced them to use Cyber-duck as a work around for
the past several (dozen) years.   I should also note that if they users
login on a Windows machine the system works fine, it just fails on Macs.

I finally got some time to look under the covers at this issue and
discovered the problem is how the Mac (Mountain Lion) is resolving the
symbolic links.   For the lack of a better description, the Windows clients
allow the server to resolve the symbolic link, so /home/user/web-site is
resolved as SAMBASERVER:/home/user/web-site, using wide links.   The Mac on
the other hand defines the link to mean literally MACCLIENT:/web-site and
looks for /web-site on the client machine.

After several days of searching the web, is there a fix for this issue?
Something I have probably over looked I am sure.

Thanks in advance

Jeff Johnson
University of Minnesota