#130 Symlink in Linux guest

[John Peterson]

Which guests support symlinks in a Windows 7 VMware Workstation host NTFS share?

This artifact https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=2531303&group_id=204462&atid=989708 seems to say that Gentoo guests support "ln -s".

In Ubuntu the operation
cd /mnt/hgfs/shared; touch foo; ln -snf foo fum
return
ln: failed to create symbolic link `fum': Permission denied
and if
sharedFolder0.followSymlinks = "FALSE" (in .vmx)
it returns
ln: failed to create symbolic link `fum': Operation not supported

# cat /etc/issue
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS \n \l
# sudo dpkg -s open-vm-tools
Version: 2011.12.20-562307-0ubuntu1
VMware Workstation 8.0.2 build-591240

[John Peterson]

The share is mounted with
mount -t vmhgfs .host:/ /mnt/hgfs

[Steve]

Hi John,

Currently for Windows hosts symlinks are not supported. We currently don't have plans to add it either.

Only supported on Linux/OS X hosts.

Sorry.
Steve

[John Peterson]

Can it be patched in modules/linux/vmhgfs/inode.c:Hgfs*Symlink* or does it also require a patch for vmware-vmx.exe?

[Steve]

It requires new code to be implemented in the vmware-vmx for the HGFS server side in the Windows platform specific code.

Steve

[John Peterson]

As a workaround I'm using NFS to access the Windows host. (Allegro is the best Windows NFS server as it supports symlinks and locks and is open source.)

It's important for me to be able to store all data on the host since my files are better organized that way.

[Steve]

Thanks I will try that out. I know Windows have their own services for Unix which I have briefly tried in the past but not recently.

[John Peterson]

Windows NFS servers

This post describe

• checkout and build vlc and firefox on Windows NTFS

from

• Debian/Ubuntu nfs-common

Microsoft Server for NFS

3.5, 2003-11-08

Not tested

I've not figured out how to run it in Windows 7 x64. nfssvc.exe and pcnfsd.exe exit silently shortly after they are run. It could be because of a simple missing file or registry setting or a more complex reason such as incompatibility with a system file that can't be replaced. (It's not possible to run the installer (SFU35SEL_EN.exe) in Windows 7 x64 and I've not thoroughly examined all files and settings it writes to make sure it's not a case of a missing file or setting.)

Cygwin nfs-server

2.5, 2006-10-17

vlc make fails because the symlink support fails for 'tar x'. (For example tar xvjfk vlc-contrib-i686-w64-mingw32-latest.tar.bz2 fails with the message "tar: [i686-w64-mingw32/lib/libdts.a]: Cannot utime: No such file or directory".)

Another problem is that hard (junction) and symbolic folder links on the server are presented as symlinks to the client, which of course don't have the paths pointed to. I prefer to share one folder on the NFS server and link folders from that share, it's a significant burden to not have this feature available.

haneWIN NFS Server

1.2.3, 2012-04-23

vlc make fails because sed fails. It can only make projects who's makefile don't use sed.

sed with the current Debian/Ubuntu nfs-common write its temporary file with chmod 000, the server honors that and sed can't deleted its temporary file and returns a nonzero ${?} so that make ends. The server author Herbert Hanewinkel says that this is an issue with nfs-common and it might not be fixed in the server.

Allegro NFS Server

master@john-peterson, 2012-05-22

vlc and firefox (and perhaps many other projects) can be built

In the current repo vlc make fails because nfsd-rename is too sensitive to ERROR_ACCESS_DENIED and because it reads and writes an incorrect mtime so that the autoconf mtime comparison between Makefile and config.status fail and run config.status in an endless loop. But fixed have been posted on the repo site https://github.com/franzinc/nfs/issues.

So NFS is a viable workaround but vmhgfs support for symlinks would be superior. It could also emulate file locks like Allegro NFS Server does for increased compatibility in case they are used, however autoconf that normally lock files will honor an NFS share mounted with -onolock and don't attempt to lock files.