[Samba] Symbolic link gets overwritten

Daniel Johnson
Sun, 11 Jan 2004 03:53:44 -0000

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On 10 Jan 2004 at 18:49, Martin Schuster wrote:
> hard/symbolic links") and the answer was "what samba did was to
> follow very precisely the instructions given by your MS Windows
> software", which is the wrong point of view, I think, because then
> samba should also deliver the symbolic link file, not the file the
> link points to, right?

It actually worked correctly in that case.  Most Windows applications
I've dealt with don't overwite existing files when saving.  They
create a new file, fill it with the information, delete the old file,
and rename new_name to old_name.

When Windows asks for the file, Samba does the right thing by sending
the link's target.  When Windows wants the file deleted, Samba
deletes the link instead of the target because that's the way links
are treated in *nix.  It has no way of knowing that Windows is really
doing a save operation.

I imagine the only way to deal with this would be making Samba cache
the file operations without doing anything destructive.  After X
time, review the cache for hints that a save was being done and then
perform the operation "properly".  That would probably require a
major rewrite and put a heavy load on the system.

Of course I could be wrong, I'm certainly not a Samba guru.  :)

- --
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< < NOTHIN' BUT NET > >

Daniel Johnson
Progman2000@usa.net
http://dannyj.come.to/
Public PGP Keys & other info: http://dannyj.come.to/pgp/


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