If you have a linux samba share and some of your directories are not accessible or are treated as files, then you might have a situation where those directories are actually symbolic (soft) links and you haven’t configured samba to follow symbolic links.
Symbolic links
This handy tip is only to fix a samba problem with symbolic links problem.
So the first thing that needs to be done is to determine that the directory you are trying to access is a symbolic link
Log into your linux/unix or mac machine and get the terminal up.
Do the ls -l command on the parent of the directory of the directory in question.
So for example if the directory you have problem access is /home/superuser/myfiles then you need to do an ls -l in the directory /home/superuser
$ cd /home/superuser $ ls -l -rw------- 1 superuser staff 9185280 May 19 21:58 latestTips.tar lrwxrwxrwx 1 superuser staff 38 Oct 23 2006 files -> /web/files -rw-r--r-- 1 superuser staff 25357023 Aug 24 2009 someOtherRandomFile.pdf |
From the example above, files is a symbolic link to /web/files
To fix the samba problem with accessing symbolic links, you will need to modify the samba config file, smb.conf which is normally at /etc/samba/smb.conf and add the following lines to the [global] section in that file.
follow symlinks = yes wide links = yes unix extensions = no |
Once that is done, restart samba (in ubuntu the command is $ sudo /etc/init.d/samba restart ) and presto, the symbolic links should now be accessible from samba!
