Symantec backup is unable to locate NFS drive

Recently we got a case where customer was trying to do a backup of a NFS share using Symantec. He was trying on Windows 2008 R2 and was running into issues. However, it worked in Windows 2003 SP2 + SFU 3.5 Gateway environment.

In W2K3, we had a product called Gateway for NFS. Gateway for NFS used to create a SMB share for every NFS share that you add using the Gateway GUI. This SMB share it what seems to have been visible in the Symantec UI. The Gateway for NFS component has been deprecated and it not available post SFU 3.5 (W2K3).

Using ‘Client for NFS’ in Windows 2008 R2, it mounts the share on a drive letter and does not create a ‘smb’ share. Symantec UI can only access a Windows share hence it is unable to access the drive letter.

So we researched on the issue and came up with a workaround which will provide behavior that simulates the Gateway for NFS to some extent.

We tried the steps below:

1. Enabled the SymlinkEvaluation option for NTFS file system on this machine where you were running the backup software. We used the following command to do that -
fsutil behavior set SymlinkEvaluation L2L:1 L2R:1 R2L:1 R2R:1

By default, only the Local-to-Local (L2L) and Local-to-Remote (L2R) symlink evaluation options are enabled and we need to enable Remote-to-Local (R2L) and Remote-to-Remote (R2R) evaluations to make it work. More on symbolic links is documented here - https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc754077(WS.10).aspx

2. We created a symlink to the remote NFS share using the following command -
mklink /D Link Target

3. We then shared the linked folder (C:\Link) created in step 2 over SMB and were able to start a backup job where we not only were able to add it to the selection list but also initiated a test backup.