Linux symbolic links not showing in Windows over FTP

I have set up my Raspberry Pi as a storage server. It has a 2TB disk attached to it via USB and I installed ProFTPd to provide access to it. CIFS/Samba had too much overhead, eating away all of the Pi's CPU so the transfers were very slow.

The disk's single ext4 partition is mounted at /mnt/storage and I created symlinks in the users' home directories to that mountpoint. ProFTPd is configured to allow users access to their $HOMEs.

When a user logs in over FTP with WinSCP, the storage symlink is visible and navigable (along with all hidden files). However, when they use Windows Explorer as an FTP client navigating to ftp://user@pi/ (tested with Win7), neither the symlink, nor the hidden files are visible. This is a nuisance, since I'd like to be able to use the "map network drive" feature in Windows to have the share visible in "My Computer" instead of having to use a dedicated FTP client (not all my users are tech-savvy).

Is this a problem with ProFTPd or rather (as I expect), Windows? Can I do anything to make the missing symlink show up?

neuviemeporte

Posted 2014-01-23T21:43:12.630

Reputation: 227

Look at your proftpd configuration. Are you permitting symlinks? Are you using chroot or anything? Postingyour proftpd config would be useful... – Zoredache – 2014-01-24T01:00:09.400

Yes, I have ShowSymlinks enabled in proftpd - and I know it works because they are visible and navigable in WinSCP as an ftp client. They just don't show up under Windows. – neuviemeporte – 2014-01-26T12:11:37.243

Answers

Could potentially be an issue with the Windows Explorer not being able to see the ext4 partition on the external drive. See this post regarding a similar issue with ext4 and Windows:

How to read ext4 partitions on Windows?

More than likely you'll need to use WinSCP or a client in order to transfer from the RPi FTP.

As a side note, I'm using a similar setup and am wondering if there is any reason not to use NTFS on the external drive? I used the following guide and have had no issues mapping drives in Windows 7 and Windows 8.

http://www.howtogeek.com/139433/how-to-turn-a-raspberry-pi-into-a-low-power-network-storage-device/

Mike Naylor

Posted 2014-01-23T21:43:12.630

Reputation: 537

FTP abstracts the underlying filesystem away, so whatever is used shouldn't matter over the network. The problem is whether the client uses the FTP MLSD and LIST commands properly. – neuviemeporte – 2014-01-23T22:03:20.670

And I can't imagine why anybody would uses NTFS for storage on Linux if they don't need to dual-boot Windows. For one, there is the FUSE overhead of ntfs-3g which matters for tiny machines like the Pi. Beyond that, NTFS is an inferior filesystem compared to high-end ones like ZFS or especially btrfs. – neuviemeporte – 2014-01-23T22:06:45.403

I used NTFS so that if the Raspberry Pi ever died it could plug in to my Windows box and retrieve the files without any headache... That's why I imagined using NTFS on a linux box. – Mike Naylor – 2014-01-24T01:59:09.057