Mysterious symbolic link

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud
1

I have just noticed that the Public share contains a folder called ‘Public’, if you open it you get the same view as the top level Public share. You can keep drilling down like this apparently forever.

Having a little bit of UNIX knowledge I have found that this is in fact a symbolic link in the Public share that points at the Public share.

I don’t know how long it has been there as (fortunately) I’ve not had to do anything to my drive since I set it up. I did some playing with the various WD backup and sync tools but nothing else.

Anyone know why it might be there and if it can be deleted without affecting anything?

Thanks

2

Please provide an image of what you are seeing. See mine below.

image

No, you can’t delete the Public share.

3

I’d guess that is the culprit somehow.

log in as root via SSH
then execute the following commands:

cd /shares/Public
rm Public

This should remove the symbolic link. Since it is not rmdir, it shouldn’t remove the target directory. But you could create a test directory, create a symlink to itself in the same way, then test the deletion…

4

Thanks for the reply cat0w, this is what a drill down of the directory
looks like - this is just what will fit in a window, I’m assuming it can go
on forever.

944×758 53 KB

Obviously this doesn’t look right but wanted to check if anyone had seen
this before and double check it’s ok to remove it.

Thanks

5

Thanks cpt_paranoia, I think you’re right removing the link is probably OK
I just wanted to check it wasn’t a crucial part of some application.

6

In case anyone else has the same problem removing the symbolic link in Linux is what I did and it does not seem to have had any adverse affects.
WD support never came up with any suggestions though I can guarantee I didn’t create the link manually and the only software I’ve used is the stuff that came with the unit.

7

thanks a lot for your replies guys, i appreciate it a lot as i was wondering about that mysteroys symbolic link too and i never thought that i’m going to find an answer :slight_smile: