Subject: [netatalk-admins] Does Netatalk follow symlinks?

From: Jorge Gonzalez <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 1997 13:52:20 +0200 (MET DST)

Hi everyone,

I've just subscribed to the list, and I have grep'ped through the list
archive, but I didn't find anything about my problem. The situation is the
following:

I have two users, A and B, who wish to share a directory inside one of their
homes. A gives rw permission to the group A and B belong to, so B can access
the directory, although it's inside A's home directory. All fine. Then B
decides that he wants to be comfortable, so he symlinks the shared directory
from A's home to his. All fine again. In UNIX, B can access A's shared
directory without a glitch, just cd'ing to it, following the symlink.

But wait, B is the proud owner of a Mac, so he wished he could access files
in the shared directory with Netatalk. Netatalk then decides that... he has
not enough rights to do it, even though he does, in fact.

Does anyone know if Netatalk has any problems following symlinks, or can it
be configured through some option I didn't see in the manpage??

Thank you, and sorry for the prose, I got inspired today...
;-DDDDD

--
Jorge González Villalonga <[email-masked]> 
Instituto de Investigación Tecnológica - UPCo --- Madrid (SPAIN)
http://www.iit.upco.es/~jorgegv/
Phone: +34 15 41 96 41 --- Fax: +34 15 42 31 76

---

From: Bill Studenmund <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 1997 16:38:13 -0700 (PDT)

> directory without a glitch, just cd'ing to it, following the symlink.

You might try having A give rwx permissions to the group. For directories,
x means you can cd through the directory. For (an unrelated) example, anon
ftp servers' "private" directory typically has the world execute bit set,
but not the world read. Thus everyone can cd through (if they know the
name of the destination), but they can't ls.

> be configured through some option I didn't see in the manpage??

Netatalk probably has no problem with the symlink. It just doesn't like
the permissions it finds on the other end. Remember, symlinks typically
have ALL permission bits set.

Take care,

Bill