Re: NFS tries following remote symlinks as if local!

[Adam Warner <lists@consulting.net.nz>]

On Tue, 2001-11-20 at 13:40, Dave Sherohman wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 20, 2001 at 01:31:21PM +1300, Adam Warner wrote:
> > I can mount the remote filesystem on my client machine no problem. But
> > if I try to change to a remote symlinked directory I get, for example:
> > 
> > bash: cd: backup2: No such file or directory
> > 
> > Because that directory doesn't exist on my _local_ machine.
> 
> Uh...  That's the way symlinks are supposed to work.  This is even a
> Good Thing since it allows you to use them to make it look like local
> machine-specific data is inside an NFS-mounted directory.  (For
> instance, when NFS-mounting /home, I'll usually symlink ~/.netscape
> to a local directory to prevent netscape from needlessly sending its
> cached files over the network.)

Thanks for the reply.

So let's change tack. How would I go about mounting the entire contents
of a remote computer's filesystem and only be able to access the remote
computer's files within subdirectories of that mount point? There would
be no confusion following remote symlinks because I would be only
navigating the remote filesystem within that mount point.

BTW Samba does seamlessly follow remote symlinks. I'm using the
technique right now to access media that is mounted over a number of
remote partitions through a single mount point. But I cannot get the
underlying file permissions through Samba (which requires further Samba
development to map Unix --> NT --> Unix permissions).

Regards,
Adam