Mike Eisler wrote:
> paul.richards@gmail.com (Paul Richards) wrote in message
> news:...
>> Hi,
>> I have an nfs export set up as follows in my /etc/exports:
>>
>> /a spongebob(rw)
>>
>> Which (surprisingly enough) the machine spongebob can mount OK..
>>
>> The problem comes where I have some samba mounts on the server
>> located at /a/mounts/1, /a/mounts/2, /a/mounts/3, etc.. The machine
>> spongebob can't access anything from inside of the samba mounts..
>> It can see that the directories 1, 2, and 3 exist, and can even cd
>> into them. It just doesn't see any of the files inside and can't
>> open them.
>
> NFS servers will typically not let clients cross a server's mount
> point.

This is completely correct. There are a ton of reasons for this, but
allowing machine C to inherit permissions from machine B to access things on
machine A just breaks a lot of security and file locking paradigms.
Transitive directory mounting is just a big, big, big problem.

> Try exporting the samba mounts. This assumes the samba file system
> will allow NFS exporting.

Try the reverse. You can SMB export almost anything, including other SMB
mounts and including NFS mounts. Alternatively, set up the SMB mount to be
mounted somewhere else on machine B and C and use symbolic links inside /a
pointing to the other SMB mount point, which is a quite common way to do
things.