CIFS, symlinks, mfsymlinks question
by pchristy from LinuxQuestions.org on (#6H25N)
A question for the networking gurus out there!
I have a Raspberry Pi4 running OpenMediaVault as a small NAS device. The attached storage drive is formatted ext4. I use it as a media server and also as a local repository for Slackware and associated software that I use a lot. I keep it up-to-date with Slackware.UK using rsync.
In the past, I mounted it as a NFS share, which has worked perfectly for some time. However, recent (-ish!) changes in Slackware now prevent the share from being unmounted by a user. Not a major issue, but an irritating one!
I thought I would try cifs instead of NFS. Initially, this seemed to work very well. I can mount and unmount the shares at will, and copy stuff hither and thither as required. The problem arises with rsync-ing the Slackware trees, which contain symlinks.
I know that windoze filesystems don't support symlinks, but that doesn't apply here, as both client and server are running Linux filesystems. It appears to be a limitation of cifs itself.
The suggestions I've seen are to force it to use vers-1 of cifs, which supposedly does support symlinks, or to use something called mfsymlinks.
From what I've read, mfsymlinks creates a text file that cifs interprets as a symlink, but is not really a symlink on the storage drive. Is this correct?
Is there anyway of creating proper symlinks over cifs other than reverting to an obsolete version?
Or have I completely misunderstood what is going on?
Any suggestions gratefully received!
--
Pete
I have a Raspberry Pi4 running OpenMediaVault as a small NAS device. The attached storage drive is formatted ext4. I use it as a media server and also as a local repository for Slackware and associated software that I use a lot. I keep it up-to-date with Slackware.UK using rsync.
In the past, I mounted it as a NFS share, which has worked perfectly for some time. However, recent (-ish!) changes in Slackware now prevent the share from being unmounted by a user. Not a major issue, but an irritating one!
I thought I would try cifs instead of NFS. Initially, this seemed to work very well. I can mount and unmount the shares at will, and copy stuff hither and thither as required. The problem arises with rsync-ing the Slackware trees, which contain symlinks.
I know that windoze filesystems don't support symlinks, but that doesn't apply here, as both client and server are running Linux filesystems. It appears to be a limitation of cifs itself.
The suggestions I've seen are to force it to use vers-1 of cifs, which supposedly does support symlinks, or to use something called mfsymlinks.
From what I've read, mfsymlinks creates a text file that cifs interprets as a symlink, but is not really a symlink on the storage drive. Is this correct?
Is there anyway of creating proper symlinks over cifs other than reverting to an obsolete version?
Or have I completely misunderstood what is going on?
Any suggestions gratefully received!
--
Pete