Widelinks make traditional UNIX symbolic links in user file systems useful to SMB clients. When an NFS client encounters a symbolic link in a file system, it resolves the target of the link itself. The challenge is that while the target path of the symbolic link is meaningful to NFS clients, it is most likely of no use to SMB clients. This challenge is addressed by configuring a Microsoft Windows Local DFS root on the NAS server that hosts the user file systems, which include UNIX symbolic links that must be translated for SMB clients. Entries are added to the DFS root so that the NAS server can translate the UNIX paths.
For example, assume that widelink1 looks as follows to an NFS client: