Actually, this is not symbolic linking in any traditional sense. The SIS
service is used in conjunction with their remote installation processes
for building and configuring Win2K client workstations.
Basically, a drive marked for mirroring is tagged to use SIS which scans
the drives and looks for duplicates. Any dupes are copied to the central
store and a link is left in the original place to transparently map into
the store. When the remote machines are installed from the server, it
will trace any of the links into the store and send the real file as
required. It's a variation on some other techniques, largely in the
database world, that is designed to reduce the image size for
replication. Given the Microsoft tendency to toss multiple copies of
libraries and other bit around, it probably will save a great deal of
space on the system.
The other thing to note, this is not used in conjunction with normal
file I/O activity, it's strictly a service aimed at replication servers.
It's also a userland service that really could be easily duplicated in a
Linux distribution were one of the vendors so inclined.
John
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