File sharing services are perhaps one of the most common uses for a network services box. Samba allows sharing files using the Microsoft Windows methods. It does a good job meshing the Linux ideas and Windows ideas – most of the time. Sharing a linked file has a problem, though.
eBox puts its Samba shares in the /home/samba/… and doesn’t allow tinkering with the samba configuration files. This means that, if you have a file or folder somewhere else, you have to use a link to have it appear in your shared files folder.
If you have the Samba Unix Extensions enabled, which they are by default, a Linux client won’t be able to access files on that share through the link as it sees the link as being local. To fix this, you have to disable the Unix Extensions. See the bug report at contribs.org.
The Unix Extensions allow users to set their own file permissions and such things. Since eBox won’t allow tweaking the server configuration file to turn them off, you need to turn them off when you mount the share on the client. The key option to use is ‘nounix’ as in the following example:
sudo mount.cifs
//serverIPaddress/sharename localmountpoint
-o user=workgroup/userid%password,
noperm,file_mode=0666,dir_mode=0777,nounix