From: Greg Ercolano <erco@(email surpressed)>
Subject: Re: [WINDOWS/ADMIN] Windows Vista: real symbolic links..?
   Date: Wed, 30 May 2007 01:58:08 -0400
Msg# 1554
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Greg Ercolano wrote:
> When I recover from shock, I'll do some more tests within Rush.

	Wow, yeah, Vista's symlinks to UNC network drives works
	inside Rush too.

	This is pretty cool.. it means you can finally use regular
	pathnames to your file server, without the double leading slash,
	and without being locked to hostnames in paths.

	It also means that if a server dies, you can change the symlinks
	to point to a different server, just like unix.

	Pardon me while I have a heart attack.

	And holy crap, in DOS you can even 'CD' to the symlink, and
	end up with your server as the 'current directory'. In the past,
	this was impossible (*); DOS wouldn't let you CD to a UNC path, it
	had to be a drive map. But DOS has no trouble following a symlink
	to a UNC path. So this kinda obsoletes drive letters, and all that
	weird baggage they imply.

	BTW, in a directory listing, the symlink shows up displayed
	in a reasonable manner as well:

C:\>dir c:\ | findstr jobs
05/29/2007  10:07 PM    <SYMLINKD>     jobs [\\tahoe\jobs]
                        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

	Be sure to use RMDIR to remove a symlink created with MKLINK /D.
	Do NOT use 'DEL'.. it tries to *follow* the symlink, and delete
	the files on the server. This behavior is unlike rm(1) in unix.

	So symlinks in Windows.. apparently hell has frozen over.

	I need a drink.


(*) There's actually a registry tweak that allows a UNC path to be
    the current working directory in DOS:
    http://support.microsoft.com/kb/156276 (**)

    Allow UNC paths at command prompt
    [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Command Processor]
    "DisableUNCCheck"=dword:00000001






<rant>
(**) OK, it's 7 years later and that Knowledege Base link is of course 404.
     Damn Microsoft, how much do you pay your web guy to break the support knowledge base?
     So where's the KB article database now? Questions like this go unanswered:
     https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/505034/where-is-microsoft-knowledge-base-now

     Supposedly this page describes "how to query the microsoft knowledge base":
     https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/how-to-query-the-microsoft-knowledge-base-by-using-keywords-and-query-words-1f39ec6a-edc7-e3dd-d265-77270160bfc6
     ..but when you follow the link it recommends, that 404's too [screenshot]:
     https://www.seriss.com/people/erco/tmp/microsoft-support-search-404.jpg

     At least the 404 page gives a search prompt. But, searching for that KB article
     gives two Chinese pages self-advertising pages hawking "Microsoft 365" [screenshot]:
     https://www.seriss.com/people/erco/tmp/microsoft-kb-156276.jpg

     Looking good Microsoft, thumbs up. Keep up the good work.
</rant>

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