# NFS Mounts + Symbolic Links



## lnoelstorr (Dec 15, 2003)

Hi, I've got some shared directories from my Linux box to automount in OSX so that they come up in the Networks->Servers folder (I used an NFS tool for OSX the name of which I cannot remember).

Anyway, it all works fine, except that I cannot follow symbolic links on the mounted shares.

Is this a problem at the Linux end or the OSX end? can it be sorted or is it something that will not be possible?


Cheers in advance for any help.


----------



## btoneill (Dec 15, 2003)

It all depends on the symbolic link, which comes down to what a symbolic link is. Basically (in very general terms) a symbolic link is a file, that holds the path name to another file. The filesystem itself will direct you to the file that is held in the symbolic link. 


```
$ cd /tmp
$ ln -s foo foo2
$ ln -s /tmp/foo foo3
$ ln -s ../tmp/foo foo4
$ ls -la foo*
-rw-r--r--   1 btoneill staff         48 Dec 15 11:36 foo
lrwxrwxrwx   1 btoneill staff          3 Dec 15 11:37 foo2 -> foo
lrwxrwxrwx   1 btoneill staff          8 Dec 15 11:37 foo3 -> /tmp/foo
lrwxrwxrwx   1 btoneill staff         10 Dec 15 11:40 foo4 -> ../tmp/foo
```

Now, given the above example, if you shared /tmp out over the network, and mounted it as /Volume/tmp on your box, access to foo2 would work fine, but access to foo3 would not. When you try to access foo3, it is looking for the full path of /tmp/foo on your computer. foo4 would work, assuming you mounted the drive as tmp (/Volume/tmp). Basically, if the symlink is pointing to a relative path, it will work over NFS (assuming the path that it points to is also shared via NFS), if it's pointing to a full path, it will only work correctly if the exact same full path exists on the remote server.

Brian


----------



## antadam (Dec 17, 2003)

also, make sure you have following symbolic links turned on in your config file on the linux machine


----------

