samba - Apr 2000 - deletion of symlinks from Windows Clients

All,

I would like to use symlinks to give my users access to all folders they
need right from their home directory. I create the symlinks as root and
they cannot delete the symlink in their home directory from windows.
However when they try to delete the folder (ie highlight it and hit the
delete key from windows) the contents of the folder is deleteable (if
they have write access to the folder) even though the symlink is not
deleteable. I need these users to have write access to many of these
folders. It seems that Windows wants to recursively delete the contents
of the symlinked folder and then delete the folder; which is Window's
default behavior for deleteing a folder but not UNIX's in regard to
symlinks. Does anybody know of a way around this. I guess I just want to
avoid the casual deletion of an smylinked folder by one of my users.

--
-=================================-
Michael Marschall
Infrastructure Manager
VoiceRite, Inc.
7725 NW 48th St.
Miami, Florida 33166
Phone / Fax / Pager : 305 436 1574
-=================================-

[Michael Marschall]
> I would like to use symlinks to give my users access to all folders
> they need right from their home directory. I create the symlinks as
> root and they cannot delete the symlink in their home directory from
> windows.  However when they try to delete the folder (ie highlight it
> and hit the delete key from windows)
Why on earth would they do that?  (Or are you asking yourself the same
question?)
> the contents of the folder is deleteable (if they have write access
> to the folder) even though the symlink is not deleteable. I need
> these users to have write access to many of these folders. It seems
> that Windows wants to recursively delete the contents of the
> symlinked folder and then delete the folder; which is Window's
> default behavior for deleteing a folder but not UNIX's in regard to
> symlinks. Does anybody know of a way around this. I guess I just want
> to avoid the casual deletion of an smylinked folder by one of my
> users.
Your message is very confusing, at least to me.  If the user highlights 
the folder and hits `delete', what do you *really* want to happen?

* folder is deleted
* contents of folder are deleted, folder itself remains
* contents of folder that are owned by the user are deleted, other
  people's files remain
* symlink is deleted, folder is still there but inaccessible
* nothing happens because it was probably a mistake

The first two should be easy enough with proper ownerships/permissions.
The third requires the `sticky' bit on the Unix directory (chmod 1777).
The last two are probably not possible.

Peter