When mounting shared host files with vboxsf, softlinks fail to be copied.

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Description:

A host OS Ubuntu 9.10 shares out files in a directory Engineering_85 as an OracleVirtualBox 'device'. A guest OS Ubuntu 9.10 mounts the host files, thus:

sudo mount -t vboxsf -o rw,gid=1000,uid=1000,dmode=0777,fmode=0777 Engineering_85  /home/ddade/mounts

The mount is listed in the guest OS, thus:

ddade@UbuntuBlade01:~/mounts/test/server/sql_performance$ ls -lt
ls: cannot access test_database: No such file or directory
ls: cannot access refresh_database: No such file or directory
ls: cannot access test_sql_performance: No such file or directory
total 24
-rwxrwxrwx 1 ddade ddade  578 2010-12-07 14:31 l.txt
-rwxrwxrwx 1 ddade ddade  518 2010-12-06 17:10 Jamfile
-rwxrwxrwx 1 ddade ddade 2717 2010-12-06 17:10 refresh_database.cpp
-rwxrwxrwx 1 ddade ddade  423 2010-12-06 17:10 run-me-first.sh
-rwxrwxrwx 1 ddade ddade 2170 2010-12-06 17:10 test_database.cpp
-rwxrwxrwx 1 ddade ddade 4093 2010-12-06 17:10 test_sql_performance.cpp
?????????? ? ?     ?        ?                ? refresh_database
?????????? ? ?     ?        ?                ? test_database
?????????? ? ?     ?        ?                ? test_sql_performance

Problem: Links show up as "No such file or directory". This is an error. Linux 'inodes' that represent softlinks should be copied as directory entries (regular files). It appears that OracleBox insists on following the links to their target.

If the target does not actually exist, that is OK. The link should be shared-out to the guest OS, and presented correctly as if the file were on the original (host) OS file system.

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See the last few lines of the file: No such file or directory rtldrNativeLoad: dlopen('libvdeplug.so.2', RTLD_NOW | RTLD_LOCAL)