Subject: [netatalk-admins] Symlink problems - please help

From: Derrick Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 00:56:42 -0400 (EDT)

Hi.  I'm running netatalk-1.4b2+asun2.1.3 on a Red Hat Linux 5.2 machine
with kernel 2.2.5.

I have about 6 or 7 directories shared (staging areas for web sites). 
Several of these volumes contain symbolic links to another directory,
which is a hierarchy of standard .html files published on the site over
the past few years (~16000 files).  The files are placed in this hierarchy
by a daemon which interfaces to an external publishing system.  The files
are all owned by user/group 'www:www', and are readable/writeable by that
user.  There are no files anywhere in the shared directories that are
otherwise.  This is the username used to mount the afp volumes. 

The webmaster of the site uses Adobe Pagemill on his Mac to update the web
site.  Everything works correctly until he enters the symlinked directory
(using Open in the menu bar), edits a file, and tries to save it.  He then
gets a "File Reference Error" and the file doesn't save.

I've noticed that a number of 'tmp' files show up in the same directory
when this is going on. Also, things seem to work better, but not
perfectly, after the file is double-clicked in the Finder instead of
opened from the menubar. 

I've tried netatalk-1.4b2+asun2.1.4, MacOS 7.6.1 and Mac OS 8.5, with no
effect.

I've been searching mailing list and Usenet archives, and the best I can
figure out is that this has something to do with inodes, and the fact that
netatalk uses Unix inode numbers for file IDs, and Unix returns the same
inode number for symlinks as it does for the files the links point to. So,
I think I have a vagueish understanding of what the problem might be, but
I am completely lost digging in the source code. 

I can't get rid of the symlink, because it would take hours to
stage/publish the sites if it had to copy the entire archives hierarchy
each time.

Is there *ANYTHING AT ALL* I can do to work around this?  I have tried
every last thing I can think of, and am pretty desperate at this point.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. 

Derrick Miller
[email-masked]

---

From: Derrick Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 01:31:59 -0400 (EDT)

> please don't call it that. asun2.1.4 doesn't exist yet.

er, oops.  i only read your warning about that like 5 times. i actually
cut & pasted that from the directory name it untarred as. perhaps if you
named the directory pre-asun2.1.4 it might help to further alleviate
confusion.  sorry - please don't hurt me. 

> if you're willing to take the big plunge, i'll tell you how to convert
> to pre-asun2.2.0 and it's fixed id's. i'm going to stick a big warning
> around this because it means all your .AppleDouble files will need to
> get upgraded. in addition, i might decide to store some of the
> .AppleDouble info in one of the current database files. as a result, i
> don't want people using it extensively now as you might need to
> re-create the database file in the future.

I think this sounds like a good idea.  The .AppleDouble files only contain
the resource fork, correct?  If this is true, it should be much less of a
risk as far as data loss because none of the files have a resource fork
that matters.  (.html, .jpeg, .gif)

So, sure, I'll go for it.  Hopefully I'll even be able to provide some
useful feedback on it.

Thanks Adrian :)

- Derrick