How do you make symbolic links work with a remote mount?

Question

I have two servers, A and B

A has two filesystems, /alpha and /beta

I have a symbolic link:

ln -s /alpha/foo /beta/bar

Such that:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root    root           70 Dec 22 13:32 /beta/bar -> /alpha/foo

Next, I mount /beta, remotely on B via an NFS mount

The link no longer works.

Is there a way to achieve this. I'd like to be able to access A:/alpha/foo on server B, but I want to be able to do it via the /beta/bar symbolic link.

Do I need to modify my mount, or my link? Or am I trying to achieve the impossible?

UPDATE

I should have added: 'without mounting /alpha to server B'. In short, I would like the symbolic link to be followed to the actual file in question whenever server B accesses /beta/bar

Answer 1

Soft links only contain a path to another file on the local machine. You cannot reference a file that is not accessible on the local filesystem(s).

Options:

• Don't use soft links, copy the file
• Cross-linking (almost always a bad idea)
• Reorganize/redo whatever imposes the file access requirement

Answer 2

The link correctly points to /alpha/foo, but that doesn't exist on your machine. If you mount /alpha, the link will work.

Answer 3

You might be able to use the sshfs utility to do what you want to do. This will let you mount a filesystem on a remote computer, on your local one. Here's a reference to how to do this: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-sshfs-to-mount-remote-file-systems-over-ssh