Ran into an interesting problem today. I was moving files to a new SAN for a little build cluster. I was mounting the share to the same place as the old files were mounted to but when I ran ln -s it kept saying permission denied…even though I am root. I also did an ls on the directory to make sure I wasn’t trying to overwrite an existing file and there was nothing (which is very weird…keep reading).
The problem turned out to be with autofs. We were using autofs to keep the storage mounted in our little cluster of machines. The weird thing is that it will not show the directory it is mounting when doing an ls. I do ls /auto/ and I see nothing. I do ls /auto/home and voila, I see a bunch of files. So, I just had to turn off autofs and the symbolic link worked just like it should.
