Using Symlinks in Samba

Recently I had to move some data to external eSATA drive array and then make just some of the directories on the external array available to Samba. The directories had to appear within a certain folder structure. Using symlinks on the Linux side and enabling them in the smb.conf is normally a pretty straightforward thing to do by having the following in smb.conf:

follow symlinks = yes

But after having Samba reload the config and trying to access the symlinked directory, I kept getting an error stating the directory wasn't accessible and the access is denied. After doing a little digging, it seems that Samba changed the default for one of its [Global] options and that default breaks symlink access for Windows clients. Adding the following to the [Global] section allowed the symlinks to function properly again:

unix extensions = no