Making sure symlinks work on CIFS/SMB mounted shares

I was recently working on some backup scripts to make sure I could clone all my GitHub repositories to my NAS, which I have mounted to a Raspberry Pi that handles all my backups.

I'm using gickup to run through all my GitHub repos and clone them locally, and I configured it to clone each repo directly into my NAS share, which is mounted over CIFS using something like:

sudo mount -t cifs -o uid=pi,username=myuser,password=mypass //my-nas-server/Backups /Volumes/Backups

Most repositories cloned correctly, but a few had symlinks inside, and when git was cloning them, the process would error out with:

6:42PM INF cloning community.digitalocean path=/Volumes/Backups stage=locally
6:42PM PNC symlink digital_ocean_account_info.py community.digitalocean/plugins/modules/digital_ocean_account_facts.py: operation not supported path=/Volumes/Backups stage=locally
panic: symlink digital_ocean_account_info.py community.digitalocean/plugins/modules/digital_ocean_account_facts.py: operation not supported

And indeed, if I tried manually creating a symlink, it would fail in the same way:

pi@backup:/Volumes/Git-Backups $ touch a.txt
pi@backup:/Volumes/Git-Backups $ ln -s a.txt b.sl
ln: failed to create symbolic link 'b.sl': Operation not supported

As it turns out, since my NAS supports only SMB2 and SMB3, I had to add mfsymlinks to the opts so I would be able to create symlinks in the mounted shares:

sudo mount -t cifs -o uid=pi,mfsymlinks,username=myuser,password=mypass //my-nas-server/Backups /Volumes/Backups

Now git can happily clone repos with symlinks, and my backups are just a little more complete!