Environment: An EMC filer VNX5400 and an OS X client El Capitan 10.11.6
Protocol: Server Message Block (SMB)
The issue: The client can see empty directories only

The VNX filer has the ability that file systems can be access vie SMB protocol as well via NFS. It’s a so called “mixed type” volume. Accessing the NFS share from a Linux/UNIX/Solaris client gives the possibility to create symbolic links. Symbolic links can point to directories or to files. Accessing such a sym-link to a directory from OS X with SMB protocol results in a way that the directory is shown but it’s empty. As default OS X is using SMB version 3. A solution is to use version 1. Obviously this version doesn’t care about sym-links or doesn’t “know” about it.

To achieve this result one has to create a file ~/Library/Preferences/nsmb.conf with the following content:

[default]
smb_neg=smb1_only

Now you can mount the share in the usual way with “Finder” and “Connect to Server…” :

smb://server/share

A very similar situation exists also for Windows based operating systems. One can query the settings with
fsutil behavior query SymlinkEvaluation
and all 4 settings should be enabled.

Update January 2017

In the meantime I updated my MacBook to macOS Sierra 10.12.3
The solution described above doesn’t work anymore.