Symbolic links inside deployed ear/war are not followed by web server

when creating a symbolic link inside a deployed ear/war the symbolic link's target is not followed when
accessing it from a web browser
i.e.
in jboss-as/standalone/deplyoment/somedomain.ear/files we created a symbolic link named "version.js"
which points to /usr/share/something/version.js
the target file (/usr/share/...) is accessible by all (chmod'd to 777) and is readable by the jboss-as user which runs
the Jboss application server.

when accessing http://domain:8080/something/files/version.js we get an 404 error, seems like the file is not found by
the server.

when placing the file instead of symbolic link, the file is accessible and all is well