On Tue, 2001-11-20 at 14:35, nate wrote: > Adam Warner said: > > Hi all, > > > > I've come across this crazy problem and I hope someone knows what's > > going on. > > > > I am using kernel-level NFS. Debian unstable. 2.4.14. I have > > exported / > > > > I can mount the remote filesystem on my client machine no problem. > > But if I try to change to a remote symlinked directory I get, for > > example: > > this is normal and expected behavior. all a symlink is is a pointer. > it points to a file. even if a file doesn't exist.
Nate as you can gather from my follow up post I have a higher level of understanding than that. The remote symlink points to the correct location on the remote system. Having always used Samba for remote file accesses (so I could also access the files using a Windows machine) I expected NFS to follow remote symlinks on the remote filesystem (just like when I navigate a file system when ssh'ed into a remote box). I've learned an important lesson. Since I primarily use symlinks to hide the underlying file system layout I just expected the symlinks to continue to act transparently. Though I can see the point of Dave's "Good Thing" response. If I am backing up the files on my remote computer I will have to be careful to use the -d option in cp. Otherwise I will also back up parts of my local computer as the remote symlinks translate to local paths on my computer. I just tried converting my absolute symlinks to relative ones. But it still doesn't work (because it appears I don't have the ability to descend into mounts). Here's the scenario: I'm in the NFS mount point on my local computer. I "ls -l" and see this particular link. home -> mnt/data/home So if I cd to home I should continue down the remote filesystem. Note that there is no slash (/) before mnt. This is a relative path. But it doesn't happen. Instead the mnt/data directory is empty. It appears NFS doesn't descend into mount points either. I've tried adding the "nohide" option to disable this but it made no difference. Regards, Adam
