In Windows 7 X64 I have a directory C:\shares\ Which contains 2 shared folders, each of these contains a couple of hundred symlinks, mapping the contents of 4 folders spread across 4 drives.
So C:\shares\documents\ contains a symlink for every document in D:\documents\, every document in E:\documents\ and so on up to drive J.
This is so that I can mirror the Library functionality remote use.
Now I can access and browse this share perfectly locally by browsing to \machinename\documents\ and going through it. However when accessing it from a backup appliance which I suspect uses samba or some sort of derivative, I get "Could not open dir [smb://MACHINENAME/documents/docname.doc]. Reason: Permission denied (13)."
Unfortunately I have no way of getting a more detailed error out of the appliance, and can see nothing relevant in the Event Log on the windows machine. The user being used is an administrator and I have added explicit permissions against both the directories that the symlinks point to and the symlinks themselves.
Does anyone know how I can allow remote devices to follow my local symlinks?
Best Answer
AFAIK, this is impossible. Symbolic links are going to always be resolved relative to the client. You'd have to use Directory Junctions to resolve the path relative to the server.
Note the SU question here.
"directory junction" vs "directory symbolic link"?