Fixing the SMB Symlink problem with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
by Rodney Campbell on Nov.19, 2007, under Technology
I have a number of samba shares on a Sun Solaris machine which we wish to access from a Mac running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Within these shares I often have a number of symbolic links in the unix filesystem pointing to various files and directories. In Tiger everything worked just fine. But in Leopard it tries to translate these links (aliases) to the local filesystem, which of course results in the links being dead.
The problem is that Leopard’s SMB/CIFS supports the Unix Extensions, which include support for server-side symbolic links.
I havn’t yet found a solution which could fix this at the client end however adding:
unix extensions = no
to the servers smb.conf file disables these unix extensions and returns the overall functionality back to how it was with Tiger.
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December 30th, 2007 on 4:05 pm
Thank you for that little hint – I was wondering what went wrong with my symlinks!
January 29th, 2008 on 6:51 am
You know what’s cool? Disabling all the cool authentication of your Samba shares. Leopard fails again!
July 3rd, 2008 on 7:10 am
Thanks, this proved very useful to me, too!
July 17th, 2008 on 2:17 am
Sweet tip! Thanks.
February 7th, 2009 on 12:15 pm
Works perfect. Thank you =)
March 11th, 2009 on 8:24 pm
Hell that was useful, thanks!
March 24th, 2009 on 3:59 am
Thank you for your hint!
This helps a lot.
However, after applying the change to the smb.conf, our server does not show up in Finder anymore.
Instead I have to manually use Apple + K in order to connect to the server via its IP address.
Have you not had similar issues? Can you think of a solution to this?
Any help would be highly appreciated!
May 8th, 2009 on 6:39 pm
I’d also like to thank you for this very helpful tidbit! It certainly worked for me too!
June 8th, 2009 on 9:33 am
Thanks for the tip, worked fine on our servers.
February 8th, 2010 on 3:02 am
Thanks! Solved my woes on Snow Leopard.