Windows Server 2008 R2 NTFS supports symlinks. If I log into the server as Administrator I can create symlinks with mklink, so I know the Admin user has the permissions to do this. If I mount a share onto an Ubuntu 10 client using mount -t cifs -o username='domain\Administrator' //server-name/smbshare /mnt/smbshare
and then try to create a symlink to a test file by doing ln -s testfile test_symlink I get the error 'ln: creating symbolic link `test_symlink': Operation not supported'
If I try just to read the contents of an existing symlink (created previously by shelling into the server) I get an 'Operation not supported' error. I have tried this with unix extensions = yes, follow symlinks = yes and wide links = yes in my smb.conf, and without them present.
Any ideas?
Further to this it seems that it's likely SMB1 does not support symlinks even if the underlying volume does. However SMB2 does - so I've tried this on a Fedora Core 13 VM which is running Samba 3.5.4, I set max protocol=smb2, with the same result as above. It's unclear to me though whether mount -t cifs actually utilises the underlying samba machinery, or whether it's a separate implementation...