samba - Mar 2007 - How to get mount.cifs to behave like a Windows client?

Hello folks,

we have a samba 3.0.22 running and it serves our windows and linux
clients with shares for home and group directories.

The group share is set up with a preexec script to check the groups of
the connecting user and create symlinks to the corresponding directories
on the file server. The script looks something like that:

#!/bin/bash
# some things here
# $1 is the connecting user
for i in $(groups $1)
do
    ln -s "/data/groups/$i" .
done

Idea stolen from "Samba 3 f?r Unix/Linux-Administratoren" by V.
Lendecke
et al.

Now up to my problem: Unix extensions are turned on for our linux
clients and I use mount.cifs to get the home directories. That's all ok.
To mount the group shares I use mount.smbfs, because mount.cifs only
displays the (then dangling) links.

So I heard that smbfs is going to vanish from the kernel and my question
is, if there is any possibility to get mount.cifs behave like a windows
client, which dereferences the links?

Any help welcome. :)

Greets, Jens.