CIFS symlink / apache

[asten77]

Hi all... longtime lurker/googler, but 1st time poster

I've been pulling my hair out for a couple days and cursing at google on this one, and I'm no closer to solving it.

I previously had a very old system with old samba mounts to a windows box. For illustration purposes, /mnt/windows

I had an apache install in /usr/www/. I had a /usr/www/htdocs/winshare directory that had an .htaccess for password protection, and the sole thing in here was a softlink (call it "c") to /mnt/windows

This worked wonderfully for many years. However, building a new box, I tried replicating this and it wasn't working. I would get nothing at all listed in a web browser pointed at servername/winshare. I get a 403 at servername/share/c. error_log shows "Symbolic Link is not allowed or link target not accessible."

So.. two key things in debugging:
first, i logged in as "daemon", which is the user that apache is running as - I could cd into the symlink directory, browse, and read files. This tells me there's no reason that apache could not access this symlink.

I then tried another symlink in the winshare directory to, say, /tmp (yes, bad idea, but just for a test). That shows up in the index, and is web browseable at servername/winshare/tmp

I've got the requisite FollowSymLink option enabled - obviously, or i wouldn't be able to browse to winshare/tmp. The issue seems to be that apache doesn't want to follow a symlink into a cifs share, despite the user having permissions to do so.

I cannot figure this out. Any help is greatly appreciated.

(for the record, this is a slack 13 box, with apache 2.2.14, mount.cifs 1.12-3.2.15)

Thanks in advance!
--asten

[elija]

We store various files in an nfs share and access them by mounting it as a local directory.

Could you do the same?

[asten77]

We store various files in an nfs share and access them by mounting it as a local directory.

Could you do the same?

Hi, thanks for the response. NFS is probably not an option here.

I have figured one thing out, if I mount the windows share directly under the directory where I was symlinking, changing nothing else, it works fine. That's not the optimal solution, but it'll do as a workaround.

Thus, it's definitely specific to symlinking to a cifs share. I don't know if this is a bug or feature in cifs or in apache. Apache is telling me it's not allowed, though, so I'm thinking it's the problem, as the user apache is running as *can* access it.

I'd still like to understand what's going on here...