So not long ago I noticed that some of my samba shares weren’t working properly. By that, I mean, I could access the main share, but some of the subdirectories were giving me an “access denied” error when trying to traverse them. It was one of those things where it was just an annoyance that I didn’t have time to research and fix so I was just working around it in different ways.

A little digging into my shares I narrowed down the issue to only subdirectories that I had Symlinked to other directories not within the original folder. The link was fine, the Linux permissions were fine, as were the the settings in my smb.conf. Regardless, I still couldn’t access the symlinked subdirectories.

Off to google. The second link pointed to an ubuntu forums post where others were having the same issue. One of which had traced it back to a security news post on samba’s website. Apparently the default setting:

wide links = yes

is too much of a security risk and has now been changed to “no” unless you set it manually in the smb.conf. So to get my shares working properly again, I added the above as well as:

follow symlinks = yes

unix extensions = no