When the CIFS server encounters a symbolic link (also called a "symlink," or "soft link"), it attempts to follow the link. If the symlink target is a path that starts with a "/", the filer must interpret the rest of the path relative to the root of the file system. On the filer, there is no way to know how NFS clients (which must be used to create the symlinks) might have mounted filesystems, so there is no reliable way to follow such absolute, or "rooted" symlinks. The symlink.translations file enables you to use absolute symlinks by mapping them to filer-based paths.
The entries in this file are similar to the httpd.translations file. The format is as follows:
Map template result
Any request that matches template is replaced with the result string given.
Both templates and results might (and usually do) contain wildcards (a star "*" character). The wildcard behaves like a shell wildcard in the template string, matching zero or more characters, including the slash ("/") character. In the result string, a wildcard causes text from the corresponding match in the template string to be inserted into the result.
The entries are examined in the order they appear in the file until a match is found or the lookup fails.
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# Example Symlink translations
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Map /u/home/* /vol/vol2/home/*
Map /u/* /vol/vol0/*