Using Software Delivery › Delivery and Staging of Software › Use of Symbolic Links

Use of Symbolic Links

The software delivery (SD) functionality provides an option to use symbolic links (also known as junction points in Windows NT Technology) on domain managers or scalability servers running Windows NT Technology or Linux. The SD system checks by itself, if it is possible to use symbolic links.

The advantage with using symbolic links is that they are very fast. The SD manager does not have to perform any unnecessary copying of data which consumes both I/O bandwidth and CPU time, and disk space is not wasted.

The restrictions for the use of symbolic links are the following:

• The use of symbolic links only works in versions of Linux that support this feature.
• On Windows NT Technology, the use of symbolic links only works with the file system type NTFS5. No versions of FAT support this option.
• The packages are not allowed to write into the ACTIVATE area folders. Doing so would affect the original source of the packages. If any package writes into the ACTIVATE area, this feature has to be disabled by setting the DSM/software delivery/shared/Use symbolic links configuration policy to False.

Note: You must have sufficient authority (user rights) on the computer when trying to use symbolic links, for example, Administrator or Backup Operator.