[Samba] Create symlinks from Windows client

[Jeremy Allison]

On Wed, Sep 15, 2021 at 04:45:29PM +0200, Mads Boye via samba wrote:
>Hi everyone.
>
>I have done some digging on this topic, and just want to confirm that there
>currently is no way of having a windows client create symlink on a samba
>4.x server. Is that correct?
>
>Long story short. We have an python application that utilizes the
>os.symlink module, and the users want to store the data the application
>outputs to a shared storage, which is a samba 4.10 file server, running on
>RHEL.
>
>Is it also correct that this was possible with SMBv1 but not in SMBv2/3
>currently?
>
>All of this is due to Windows not being able to see the samba server as a
>reparse point?
>
>Last thing I would like to confirm is that the mfsymlinks options are for
>the other way around, windows smb server and linux client, so it will not
>help me right?
>
>Is there any plans on implementing symlink support in upcoming releases, or
>is it at a "it might happen when we have time" level?
>
>Thank you in advance for the replies.

Hi Mads,

Allowing a client to set server-followed symlinks is the definition
of A.Bad.Idea. I'm really sorry we allowed it in SMB1+UNIX extensions,
and the current plan for SMB2+UNIX extensions is to store client created
symlinks as extended attributes on a zero-length file, to prevent them
being seen in the server namespace as a symlink.

The client will still see them as symlinks though, and for the client
they will behave perfectly normally. Does that meet your need ? This
feature is currently planned for the SMB2+UNIX extensions, tentatively
targetted for 4.16 (too late for 4.15, sorry).