When I mount an smbfs file system from a Samba server, I am able to create both symbolic and hard links in it with ln. However, while the hard links are real hard links on the server, they do not appear as such on the client because they have different inode numbers: testuser@computorr:~$ mkdir mountpoint testuser@computorr:~$ smbmount //henry/testuser mountpoint Password: testuser@computorr:~$ cd mountpoint testuser@computorr:~/mountpoint$ touch x testuser@computorr:~/mountpoint$ ln x y testuser@computorr:~/mountpoint$ ls -li total 0 1484 -rw-r--r-- 1 testuser testuser 0 Feb 11 15:38 x 1485 -rw-r--r-- 1 testuser testuser 0 Feb 11 15:38 y testuser@computorr:~/mountpoint$ ssh henry ls -li total 0 5308465 -rw-r--r-- 2 testuser testuser 0 Feb 11 15:38 x 5308465 -rw-r--r-- 2 testuser testuser 0 Feb 11 15:38 y Would it be possible to use the unique ID in the attributes returned by the server to set the inode number on the client, instead of generating a new inode for every dirent? smbd sets the unique ID using the inode number on the server, so this ought to get hard links right. I can see that this could potentially return the same inode number for distinct files if the share crosses multiple filesystems on the server. However, I think inode numbers only really looked at when creating temporary/lock files and only on hard links within the same directory. -- Martin Orr Linux Administrator, Methodist College Belfast