Unable to access Symbolic link on a NFS share

While working on one of the case, the customer reported that he was unable to access symbolic link of a NFS share. The symbolic link was pointing to another directory under the same NFS share. The NFS share was hosted on Windows 2008 R2. While checking the properties of the link, we found that the link was created using the UNC path instead of the absolute path. We suggested the customer to create another symbolic link and in the target field put the absolute path of the directory.

 For example, refer to the command below. Both the command completes with a success and the link is created for each of the command.

 

 

We mounted the share on the Link machine and then ran the ls –l command to check the attributes\permission of the files and folder. As highlighted below, for testlink (which was created using UNC path) the Linux NFS client was unable to pull any information. 

But for testlink1 (which was created using absolute path), the Linux NFS client was able to pull the information. Also we got a permission denied while trying to access testlink, but were able to access testlink1.

 

Later we also create a symblolic link ( using mklin) to a target ourside the NFS share and was able to access it from the Linux client. The test which we did had a wide open permission on the NFS share.

 

Refer the article https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753194(v=WS.10).aspx to know more about mklink.