Last week, we performed a long needed upgrade to the company file/print/intranet server. Basically, we'd been on a Redhat 8 system, and there were upgrades we were wanting to perform, and couldn't due to lack of libraries. We could have possibly compiled from source in some occasions… but that would likely have shuttled us into a similar dependency hell as using Redhat in the first place.

So, we decided to re-install the OS, and switch to Gentoo in the process. We've found that Gentoo is a great distro for servers — it allows us to tailor the install to the server purpose, and simultaneously provides a clean upgrade path via portage.

Things went primarily without a hitch. We lost a few databases due to a bad DB backup (argh! there went the wiki!), but that was the primary extent of the damage.

When investigating the sytem post-install, I discovered some connectivity issues with Samba. Basically, when connecting via a *nix-based machine, we were getting symlinks reported as being local to the connecting machine, not the server. This meant that symlinks on the server weren't being followed — which caused major issues for those connecting via FTP, Mac, or Linux.

I tried the follow symlinks and wide links directives, but these did nothing. Googling for the issue wasn't turning up anything.

And then I stumbled on a mailing list post where a person was able to answer their own question, and thankfully posted it to the list: turn unix extensions off.

Evidently, for unix clients, "these extensions enable Samba to better serve UNIX CIFS clients by supporting features such as symbolic links, hard links, etc… These extensions require a similarly enabled client." What I found was that either the client machines were mal-configured, or that the above description was faulty. As soon as I turned that off, the *nix-based clients no longer reported the server symlinks as local symlinks, but simply followed them.

And now I can work directly on the development server, for the first time, instead of using SSH. Nice side-benefit!