Thanks Igor, Mike. I've tried the -e flag, and it doesn't seem to follow the
symlinks correctly:

# check if the file exists and serve it if (-e $request_filename) { access_log off; expires 1d; break; }

# check for an index file, and serve that if (-e $request_filename/index.html) { rewrite (.*) $1/index.html break; }

# rails page caching if (-e $request_filename.html) { rewrite (.*) $1.html break; }

# route traffic to sae-conf cluster if (!-e $request_filename) { proxy_pass http://site-here; break; }

When I make the link a hardlink, it does work correctly (with just the -f flag).
The -e test should work on 0.6.32, right? Is there anything else I might need to
do, any option, compile flag, etc? I can't imagine so, but I'm pretty confident
given my local tests that its not working. Anyone have a config with -e working
on symbolic links? Maybe its worth putting together a demo site/config myself
and seeing if it would work for others. Thanks again for the help.

Posted at Nginx Forum: http://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,677,714#msg-714