Inode link count on mounted Win98 shares

[Federico Sauter <fsauter-LVkJPw3T+odGBRGhe+f61g@public.gmane.org>]

Greetings,

I want to make some CIFS shared drives accesible through a firewall. For 
that sake, I have a CIFS shared drive on a Linux box (box0, kernel 
2.6.27.57) which is accesible from outside the firewall. On the share on 
that box I mount all the shared drives from within the firewall so that 
they can be accessed from client-external.

   client-external
     172.16.1.2
          |
          |
     172.16.1.1/24
    box0 (router, firewall)
     192.168.1.1/24
          |
   +------+-------+
   |              |
  win98          winxp
192.168.1.2   192.168.1.3

box0 exports a CIFS shared drive, say \\172.16.1.1\testshare, which 
refers to local directory, /mnt/share. On /mnt/share I mount two further 
shared drives, say win98 and winxp. Thus, the contents from win98 and 
winxp become indirectly visible to the external network 
(client-external) via 172.16.1.1.

This works well if I mount \\172.16.1.1\testshare using a Linux-based 
client-external. Everything works as expected and I can browse the 
contents of both, winxp and win98. However, when I mount 
\\172.16.1.1\testshare on a Windows machine, I am unable to browse the 
contents of the win98 directory. While the winxp directory appears 
correctly as a folder in the Windows Explorer, the win98 directory 
appears as a zero byte file (even though it is mounted correctly on box0.)

I tested the same setup using my local workstation (with Debian squeeze, 
kernel 2.6.32-5) and came to the same observations. The only difference 
I could find between the mounted winxp share and the win98 share on box0 
is that the winxp mount point exhibits an inode link count of 1 after 
being mounted while the win98 mount point has an inode link count of 0:

root:/mnt/share# ls -l
total 8
(...)
drwxr-xr-x 0 root root    0 Feb 23 01:39 win98
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root    0 Mar 13 13:32 winxp

I have tried pretty much every mount option and the behavior is always 
the same.

My questions are:
1. Why do Windows 98 mounted shares show this behavior?
2. Is there any way to correct this so as to be able to browse these 
shares indirectly (as described) from a Windows PC?

Any information would be highly appreciated!

Kind regards,

-- 
Federico Sauter / Firmware developer
Innominate Security Technologies AG / protecting industrial networks
tel: +49.30.921028-210 / fax: +49.30.921028-020
Rudower Chaussee 13 / D-12489 Berlin / http://www.innominate.com/

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