Widelinks

krishrajan — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 07:18:09 GMT

Hi,

Has anyone successfully configured using widelinks?

The knowledgebase documents is not that useful.

We configured it but from cifs clients we get error "the location it refers is unavailable...."

Can you pl. post your experience?

We want to create soft links in netapp share which points to another NAS storage.

Thanks.

Re: Widelinks

adamfox — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:09:40 GMT

I have done it. The real trick is to get the symlinks and the translation table right.

Of course you start by enabling widelinks on the source share.

netapp> cifs shares -change vol1 -widelink

It should look like this in cifs shares:

vol1 /vol/data_vol1

... widelinks supported

everyone / Full Control

Then you create a symlink with a pattern that can be matched by the controller. Note: This path need not (and probably won't be) real. Here's my example

lrwxrwxrwx 1 adamfox adamfox 18 2010-02-24 11:58 widelink -> /use/this/widelink

Then you have to create an entry in /etc/symlink.translations (note: the file may not exist by default) that describes the link you want. Here's my example:

Widelink /use/this/widelink/* \\cosmo.rtpse.netapp.com\test

Now when I attach via cifs to the source (\\mojito.rtpse.netapp.com\vol1 in this case) I see a folder called "widelink". If it shows up as a folder (since CIFS clients wouldn't know what to do with a symlink anyway), that's a good sign that it will work. When I click on it, it passes me over to the "test" share on cosmo. In this case, it's a NetApp controller, but it need not be since 'mojito' is just sending a DFS redirect to the client when it hits my link.

Of course I am assuming good permissions on the destination side.

This is a small example, but I think it shows how it really works. The key is to come up with a pattern in the path of the link that can be matched by the symlink translator.

Re: Widelinks

krishrajan — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 19:40:36 GMT

Adam, Excellent. It works now! Thanks much for your help!

Re: Widelinks

peluso — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 22:31:45 GMT

Adam,

Great post -- Chris Kranz references you on this topic (along with other good resources) here.....http://communities.netapp.com/groups/chris-kranz-hardware-pro/blog/2011/03/03/cifs-widelinks#cf

Terri

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