samba - Feb 2015 - samba share is symlink, symlink gets updated, samba doesn't catch the change

I have a couple of samba shares that point to symlinks.  Basically these are
last night's copy of a bunch of data.  The path changes every night (YYMMDD
is in the path name), so I've just got one symlink that gets updated to the
path with the latest date every night.

I was using an old Samba on OpenSolaris for a long time and this process was
working.  Using 3.6.23 on RHEL and although the symlink is getting updated to
the new path every night, the share itself continues to go to what the link used
to point to.  The new server is about a week old, and so the data I see is from
the night the server was built.  That folder is still physically on the disk,
but it's not what the symlink points to anymore.  I've tried a service
smb reload, and that didn't change anything.  I also have a share that is a
couple levels higher in the directory structure.  When I navigate to the same
symlink through that share and click on it, I get the contents of the updated
link, not the old data.  Seems that Samba's caching the absolute path of the
symbolic link for the share and not updating it?

Hi,

I guess it is some kind of protection agains symlink attacks. If a share 
points directly to a symlink, the symlink is expanded on startup to 
avoid security issues if it gets modified.

Regards,
Le 02/02/2015 23:51, BJ Quinn a ?crit :
> I have a couple of samba shares that point to symlinks.  Basically these
are last night's copy of a bunch of data.  The path changes every night
(YYMMDD is in the path name), so I've just got one symlink that gets updated
to the path with the latest date every night.
>
> I was using an old Samba on OpenSolaris for a long time and this process
was working.  Using 3.6.23 on RHEL and although the symlink is getting updated
to the new path every night, the share itself continues to go to what the link
used to point to.  The new server is about a week old, and so the data I see is
from the night the server was built.  That folder is still physically on the
disk, but it's not what the symlink points to anymore.  I've tried a
service smb reload, and that didn't change anything.  I also have a share
that is a couple levels higher in the directory structure.  When I navigate to
the same symlink through that share and click on it, I get the contents of the
updated link, not the old data.  Seems that Samba's caching the absolute
path of the symbolic link for the share and not updating it?

>I guess it is some kind of protection agains symlink attacks. If a share 
>points directly to a symlink, the symlink is expanded on startup to 
>avoid security issues if it gets modified.
This makes sense, but is there some way to override it?  Or, at least I'd
think a reload
would expand the symlink again, but it doesnt.