I currently have a server that is mounting a sm share to another box. I would now like to mount the directory just below this smbfs mountpoint on my laptop

root@server:~# mount -t smbfs -o ..... //anotherserver/foo /mnt/foo
root@laptop:~# mount server:/mnt /mnt/server

Both of these mounts work. On my laptop I can see the contents of the server:/mnt in /mnt/server. However, when I browse to the foo directory on my laptop, the directory appears empty from the perspective of my laptop. I receive no error messages on either end.

I assume that this is a "feature" of NFS that I cannot browse to another remote filesystem, possibly a feature that can be changed with a flag somewhere? The man page for exports gives no information about this problem however.

PS: Mounting the share on anotherserver is not an option due to SSH tunneling going on.

/mnt doesn't really contain the NFS directory. It contains the mountpoint directory. You see the NFS directory on the original machine because you mounted the NFS directory on the mountpoint. The share from there however doesn't include the NFS but only the mountpoint (empty directory).

This is a known feature of NFS and by the way is how admins sometimes check to make sure something isn't filling up space on a filesystem that they can't see. If the mountpoint directory were NOT empty before the NFS mount you would no longer see the files contained in the mountpoint directory after the NFS mount but rather see the files from the NFS share there. Despite this the original files are still there taking up space. Suddenly /mnt goes 100%. You clean up as much as you can but the results of df -k and du -skx on the same filesystem don't agree because du can't see the space used by those files but df know's they're there.

Your solution would be to share out the mount to both other servers. In your fstab on the second server mount the /mnt from the first servers BEFORE you mount the samba share on top of it. However having submounts like that risks some odd network behavior if one of the servers goes away but the other doesn't. Were it me I'd share out both to the last server and put a symbolic link in /mnt to the second share (/mnt2). That way its accessible if mounted but only missing if not.