Subject: Symlinks & alien filesystems

From: "Stig Isaksson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Feb 1998 17:48:19 GMT+200

Hi again,
I think it proper to say because I have been sent off list for a 
while (the listserver doesn't seem to like me - it happened once 
before).

Anyway, I have a problem:

A couple of days ago I installed an extra harddisk on our Sun Ultra 1 
machine and this disk works excellently, but:

1. To start using the new immense disk space I made a symbolic link 
from a directory in the chrooted ftp root of one of our guest users 
and to a directory in the new file system on the new disk.

2. The link works fine for real logins but when, logged in as the 
aforementioned guest, I try to cd to it I get:

550 forum: No such file or directory [forum is the name of the 
directory (i.e. it's a symbolic link in the ftp root /home/sofi/ 
- the target directory it is linked to is /disk2/ftp/sofi/forum]

though forum is perfectly visible in the root with ls!

3. The link is o.k. and works for real ftp logins. The access rights 
have been set to 777 temporarily in every part of the path just to 
make sure access rights have got nothing to do with it.

4. My wu-ftpd version is wu-2.4(2) running on Solaris 2.5.1.

Sorry if this is too trivial. But I have searched and browsed the 
FAQ and list archives without seeming to find that anybody had 
exactly this problem. The crucial point seems to be that it happens 
only with guest logins and so in some way must be connected to the 
chroot mechanism.

Extremely grateful if somebody could elucidate me.

Best Regards,
Stig

------------------------------------------------------------
Stig Isaksson
Dialekt- och ortnamnsarkivet
Helgonabacken 14
S-223 62 LUND
S W E D E N
tel.: +46 46 222 74 68   fax: +46 46 15 23 81
e-mail: [email-masked]
http://www.dal.lu.se/

<Forstaor MIME    Understands MIME>
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From: Koos van den Hout _U nix and we all_ <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Feb 1998 17:51:32 +0100 (MET)

Quoting Stig Isaksson, who wrote :

> exactly this problem.

Symbolic links are relative to the _active_ root which is different in a
chrooted environment. Chroot works *very* good.

Mount your new disk within the chrooted space or use a loopback mount if
the operating system provides this.

(added to the FAQ)

                                              Koos

-- 
  Koos van den Hout,     Internetter, Unix freak, ISFJ and BBS SysOp at large
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