There are technical challenges that we need to resolve before we
can offer child mounts over SMB. It's on the to-do list but we
are focusing on DFS first.
Symlinks are one of the challenges, as are mounted file systems
with different properties than the parent.
From a user perspective, you probably expect consistent behaviour
as you move through the directories within a share. Our challenge
is how to manage any underlying discontinuities to deliver that
consistent end user experience.
I don't think you can solve your situation with symlinks. The CIFS
Service won't follow symlinks that point at a target in a different
file system. When child mounts are supported, we will have to
discriminate between symlinks that point at a child mount and those
that point elsewhere.
Alan
On 11/11/09 03:14, David Bond wrote:
Thanks for your reply,
What was the rationale behind not showing / allowing access to child file
systems? Was it technical, or some other reason?
Was the child file system design purely for administrative purposes, for
allowing inheritance of file system properties? If so wouldn’t it have been
better to have had 2 different structures, one for the file system properties
and one for the actual file / directory structure?
Kind of makes it difficult to use ZFS how it is recommended to be used (make a
file system for different users, and types of files) while using CIFS to share
out the data. (it will for us)
We need to have shares within shares for legacy applications, as some require direct access to the directory where the files are, also some people need access to the root and the sub directories / file systems from the same share, so based on what I can see with ZFS and CIFS, only file systems can be shared, not directories, meaning that these applications cannot connect use the file server as they will not be able to access all the required files.
Would it be possible to create a file system and then just use symbolic links
for the structure that is wanted? Would the file systems then be visible over
the share?
This would make things complicated, as there would have to be many file systems
for each access case, as some would need to connect at different levels.
With DFS, you don’t have to wait until the end of the year if you are in an
active directory domain (which you probably are if using CIFS) as you could
just use active directories DFS, you just will not get replication. But that
would then provide a disjointed approach, as some shares would have to point to
the file server and others to the DFS, if they are old clients, for example
windows 98, as the shares on them always link to the root of the share, when
mapping, never where you tell them to, so they have to connect to the share
directly.
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