I currently have a couple of Ubuntu servers that each contain 13 hard drives that I need to make accessible to each other over a samba network. Currently each drive is mounted as a separate share, and this works. But I was hoping that instead I could mount (via fstab) a single shared folder, and in that folder create symbolic links to each of the 13 drives. So Server 1 would have a folder called SambaMount, and in it would be 13 symbolic links, each to the shared folder on each drive. Then I could just mount SambaMount on Server 2 and only have to deal with a single shared folder that would greatly simplify my /etc/fstab and it'd be easier to monitor and set consistent security settings for.
The problem is that when I try to set this up, I can see the symlinked shared folder that exists on a hard drive on Server 1 by doing ls -lt in my new SambaMount shared folder on Server 2, but if I try to cd into that symlink directory, I get "permission denied", even as root. I have added "follow symlinks = yes" to smb.conf, but that doesn't help. Whenever I try to add any combination of "use extensions = no", "wide links = yes" or "allow insecure wide links = yes" to my smb.confs, it not only doesn't help with the new share I'm trying to create but all the existing single-drive mounted shares disappear as well.
It doesn't seem to me that user permissions could be the issue, since I can cd into those drives just fine via the samba shares that I set up for each individual drive, and I'm using the same credentials.
Any ideas? I'd rather not try to make these 13 drives into an LVM if it can be helped to achieve the objective, as I don't want a single drive failure to blow up the whole thing.
(Incidentally I was inspired to try this on Ubuntu because it was a fairly simple matter to set this up on Windows box, which also has six hard drives, so that I only have to mount a single samba share and can access all 6 drives from my Ubuntu boxes.)
