thanks.

in this context is there a diff between:

ln -s /vol/vol0/smalltest/k/kusr1 kusr1 and ln -s vol/vol0/smalltest/k/kusr1 kusr1

? Steve Losen wrote:

...

i needed to use relative paths to get this to work.

i have cifs.home_dir pointed to /vol/vol0/homelinks

when i mounted the filer from a sun box

i went into /filer/homelinks

and then i did ln -s ../smalltest2/k/kusr1 kusr1

where smalltest2 is a qtree at the same level as homelinks and kusr1 is the uid.

that's the correct way, right?

obviously[after some groaning], linking to /filer//smalltest2/k/kusr1 wouldn't work.

yes?

Yes.

This should also work on the NFS client:

cd /filer/homelinks ln -s /vol/vol0/smalltest/k/kusr1 kusr1

The important thing to remember is that the symlink must make sense to the filer, because the filer follows it. The symlink does not necessarily need to work properly on the NFS client. In this case, /vol/vol0 does not exist on the NFS client, but that doesn't stop you from creating a symlink that points to /vol/vol0.

It's fine to use relative links like you did with ../ when the cifs.home_dir directory is in the same volume as all the home directories. But what if you have multiple volumes? Then you are forced to used the /vol/vol* absolute paths for the home directories that are in a different volume from the cifs.home_dir directory.

ln -s /vol/vol0/home/k/kusr1 kusr1

ln -s /vol/vol2/home/x/xusr1 xusr1

Fortunately, ln -s does not check the filename argument on the left to be sure it exists. So you can make symlinks that point to just about anything you want.

Steve Losen scl@virginia.edu phone: 434-924-0640

University of Virginia ITC Unix Support