How do I overcome the "The symbolic link cannot be followed because its type is disabled." error when getting the target of a symbolic link?

David_Arno_7122 0
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Following on from a previous question, I am creating a symbolic link on a Server 2008 from a Vista machine using UNC paths. I can create the link just fine. I can go to the Server 2008 box and double click on the link in explorer to open the target file. What I cannot do though is use FileCreateW to get a handle to the UNC path link (from the Vista box). When I try it, it fails and GetLastError() returns error code 1463 (0x5B7), which is:

The symbolic link cannot be followed because its type is disabled.

How to enable its "type" in Server 2008 (assuming the error means what it says)?

windows-server-2008 symlink
8 Answers

Well I found the answer, though to describe it as badly documented is an understatement!

First of all, this TechEd article highlights the fact that users can "enable or disable any of the four evaluations that are available in symbolic links". Those four "evaluations" include remote to local and local to remote. It doesn't give any clue as to how to do this.

However a further search revealed this fsutil help page, which does actually document how to "enable or disable any of the four evaluations that are available in symbolic links". So to fix the problem I was having, I need to issue the following command on the Vista box:

fsutil behavior set SymlinkEvaluation L2L:1 R2R:1 L2R:1 R2L:1

in order to allow full access to where symlinks are pointing on both local and remote machines.

David_Arno_71220

Thanks David for the tip, I was becoming desperate to fix this problem which made symlinks mostly useless.

One should note that the default configuration for Vista is L2L and L2R enabled, but R2R and R2L disabled.

I first tried to enable only R2R, but this is not sufficient. R2L has to be enabled too.

The next question on my list: How to get rid of that stupid /D switch for the mklink command for directory links. The default link type should be inferred automatically from the target pathname type!

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