Unix / Linux符号链接是否支持回退？

Question

I set up an nfs/autofs-ldap system connecting 5-6 Ubuntu boxes. All my computers export their drives for storage large files, and are auto-mounted at

/drives/machine1/drive1
/drives/machine1/drive2
...

Inside the user's home directory, I ask users to set up symbolic links to point to one of the dedicated drives for storing large files. For example for user1:

cd /homes/user1/
ln -s /drives/machine1/drive1/users/user1/workdir .

when a user logs in any one of my boxes, he/she can use ~/workdir to work on data.

However, when the network is down, and a user happens to use machine1 as his desktop, I wonder if the link ~/workdir can have a fallback link, such as /local_mount/machine1/drive1, which is the original path in the fstab and /etc/exports?

if a fallback link is supported, one can still be able to access all his files without recreating the links.

does Unix/Linux symbolic link support this feature? any hack to make this possible?

Answer 1

You can setup a symbolic link at the unmounted /drives/machine1/drive1/users/user1/workdir location [aka recursive link] to point to /local_mount/machine1/drive1 .

The [only?] problem:

• You'll have to have the same /drives/machine1/drive1/users/* structure under the unmounted file system.