Samba, CIFS and Symlinks

I recently moved all my client workstations over from using NFSv4 mounts to CIFS mounts so as to integrate with U of MN Active Directory a bit better.

As with all migrations, I ran into a snag! When the user's Documents folder is mounted at their login using pam_mount via mount.cifs, symbolic links tend to break. Not all of them, only links with absolute path names on the server.

For example, here's a client's view of a file that's mounted

ls -l
l????????? ? ? ? ? ? .Rprofile

But on the server it looks like this:
ls -l
lrwxrwxrwx 1 user domain users 34 2011-09-13 09:01 .Rprofile -> /home/AD/user/r/r_tools/.Rprofile

So to solve this you have to go through and replace all absolute symbolic links with relative symbolic links. I wrote a bash script to do such a thing as I had too many to do by hand, but if you don't have too many, you can fix them by hand.

To find all symbolic links under the directory /search/base:

find /search/base -type l

To find all broken symbolic links under the directory /search/base:

find -L /search/base -type l

Good Luck!