Prabhu, What filesystem are you exporting with FSAL_VFS? And any chance you are running Ganesha on FreeBSD? I looked into symlinks on EXT4 on Linux and it seems just fine. I forced a "create_handle" for a symlink and it worked just fine (I did an ls -l of a directory with a symlink, then restarted Ganesha, then did a cat /mnt/export/dir/the-link which worked fine and showed open_by_handle_at opening the symlink object and allowing stat etc. on it. However, I see in FreeBSD open_by_handle_at can return -EMLINK so that might be your issue. And I also just forced the issue without a restart by having a large dirent cache but a small entry cache and causing the entry cache to be flushed. Please turn on READDIR and FSAL FULL_DEBUG and let's see if we can figure out what's going on. Frank