Re: NFS tries following remote symlinks as if local!

[Dave Sherohman <esper@sherohman.org>]

On Tue, Nov 20, 2001 at 02:13:08PM +1300, Adam Warner wrote:
> 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.

Sounds like a job for chroot, more or less.  (Once you chroot a
process to the remote /, it'll act just like the remote / is the real
/.  But you're also locked into the remote /, which may not be what
you want.)

Another option would be to use relative paths in your symlinks.
Instead of linking /home/user1/foo -> /home/user2/bar, link it to
../user2/bar.

Or, if both locations are on the same physical partition, you can use
hard links to assign multiple directory entries to the same inode.
ln requires that you be root to hardlink a directory, but it will do
it if you pass a -d.

So just what are you ultimately trying to accomplish, anyhow?

> BTW Samba does seamlessly follow remote symlinks.

Yeah, that's the default.  As another poster has pointed out, samba
has to do it that way because Windows can't handle a real symlink.
Best case, Windows would think it was a small text file whose
contents just happen to be a file name (with all the slashes going
the wrong way).

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