I need it for anonymous read-only access ("authenticated" via src ip), basicly structure is following:
database stores all attributes which describe file (class, date, type...),
"backend" directories store files themself, simply named by their id.
The "virtual" directory is updated on change and contains different views i.e. if there is picture file, it can be found in different directories (say by date, or by type, or by season)
these directories contain symlinks to files in "backend" directories.
Thus symlinks should not be exposed and followed (and I see no reason to have "backend" directories accessible them self) - I have it working for years with samba, but would like to add ftp support too.