Samba access denied error when accessing symlink paths.

Last week one of our business partner had issue mapping their Samba path to their workstation with access denied error.

C:\Users\azwan_ngali>net use * \\sambaserver\sys2\dellsftw\barcodes "password" /
user:domain\serviceaccount

System error 5 has occured.

Access is denied.

Despite user’s service account is a part of valid users group in /etc/samba/smb.conf, he’s still not able to map it.

Found out that the samba path is actually a symlink pointing to another directory which the service account has read / write access. Service account is a part of ap2_dev_cpdev_bar member.

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 51 Mar 17 2011 barcodes -> /stornext/snfs1/data/common/sys2/dellsftw/barcodes/

drwxrwxr-x 25510 root ap2_dev_cpdev_bar 960033 Jun 16 17:08 barcodes

To fix this problem you need to modify your SAMBA configuration.

Add / modify these three lines to enable SAMBA mapping to symlink paths.

follow symlinks = yes
wide links = yes
unix extensions = yes

Save the file and restart Samba service.

service smb restart

Try remapping the Samba path again. Access denied error will be gone.