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We have multiple Windows systems using Windows 7 (64bit). For web development, we want a project workspace directory that can be shared with a VM (Oracle VirtualBox). The solution included in Virtualbox is Shared Folders, which has been found to be awfully slow. So we are using a Windows share and CIFS.

We have a directory d:\share. There, our IDEs have their workspace. We want to mount this directory inside the local VM to /mnt/share. This is, inside the VM, the web root directory, served by an Apache instance.

Inside the virtual machine, we're using git and modman to manage the development projects. modman uses a central directory .modman, then symlinks the files inside his directory to the appropriate locations.

In our case, all these symlinks stay inside the share on Windows, they do not pass the Host/Guest barrier.

However, trying to create a symlink on the guest inside the share linking to something inside the share itself gives the error message:

ln: Symbolische Verknüpfung „b“ konnte nicht angelegt werden: Die Operation wird nicht unterstützt

(ln: symbolic link 'b' could not be created: Operation not supported)

I've found multiple sites suggesting an alteration in the smb.conf for a samba instance offering the shares (specifically wide links = yes and follow symlinks = yes). However, as these shares are Windows owned, there's no smb.conf.

I'm aware that NTFS supports symlinks (on Windows side, these are created using mklink), and some sites seemed to suggest that it's possible to create symlinks that then look like regular files, which would be fine by me. I've tested multiple mounting options, including sfu and nounix, on their own and in combination. The error message remains the same.

The mounting is currently done using

//192.168.0.111/share   /mnt/share      cifs    username=tmengelke,noperm,sec=ntlm,iocharset=utf8       0       0

Which side does need tweaking, and what do we need to tweak?

Dabu
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  • Not completely sure, so not posting this as an answer, [but check this out:](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_symbolic_link) `The default security settings in Windows Vista/Windows 7 disallow non-elevated administrators and all non-administrators from creating symbolic links. This behavior can be changed running "secpol.msc" the Local Security Policy management console (under: Security Settings\Local Policies\User Rights Assignment\Create symbolic links). It can be worked around by starting cmd.exe with Run as administrator option or the runas command.` – HopelessN00b Jan 19 '14 at 07:53
  • Although this solution sounded good, it's not the problem. After having created symlinks on the windows side (assuming that creating symlinks via the mount point was the problem), we see the same error message when accessing a symlink using the guest system. It seems that even handling a symlink is not supported at all. – Dabu Jan 21 '14 at 10:09
  • @Dabu, did you find any further information? – troseman Oct 27 '15 at 05:57
  • Sadly no. We've changed the way we develop to a remote integration via IDE and an FTP share on the virtual machine. It has it's drawbacks, but speed is not one of them. – Dabu Nov 09 '15 at 09:21

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