this may sound like a dumb question, but i cannot, for the life of me, figure it out.

i have my windows hard drives mounted within my fedora box for easier access. i'm not sure if it's a restriction on the windows side or on the linux side, but i cannot figure out how to create symlinks only on these smbfs mounts.

i'll try something like this:

# ln -s futon.jpg test
ln: creating symbolic link `test' to `futon.jpg': Operation not permitted

is there any particular reason -- perhaps on the windows end, that would contribute to this issue?

a little more background:

the samba mount is on an ntfs drive. my /etc/fstab appears like so:
//ip.address.here/sharename /mnt/share smbfs username=username,password=pass,dmask=777 0 0

i'm not sure what else is needed. i don't really know how to edit the smb.conf properly (or if it's needed at all). i CAN create files and directories within this share, just not symlinks.

thanks!

I doubt it's possible to create a symlink on a windows disk.
FAT16 and FAT32 disks certainly don't support it.
NTFS disks only recently have been given the possibility to mount network shares as specific directories
(before, you had to mount them as a "station" like X.
So again, it's doubtful if it will work.

Making a symlink on a Linux disk to a file/dir on the Windows disks should work however.
Maybe you could try mounting your Linux disks on Windows via Samba as well? Then Samba takes care of the symlinks, and the Windows user will never get to see them...

hmm, i don't know how to do that as i've never set it up the reverse way. how would i proceed in trying that?

btw, i don't HAVE to use samba (but it doesn't seem to work with CIFS and i can't figure it out on NFS yet.)

To mount your Linux disk on Windows, you basically need to set up a samba server that "exports"
your disk.
I haven't done that yet. But I think there are web interfaces available for Samba, so configuration should
be quite easy.

On Windows, you can easily mount it:
enter Explorer,
select the menu "Tools" - "Map Network Drive"
type in the path in the form \\server\shared_directory

Or alternatively, use Windows' "netuse" command.