[Samba] special chars in windows filenames

[Matthew Geier]

On Mon, 2004-04-05 at 20:47, Joachim Thüx wrote:
> Hi folks!
> 
> I upgraded a red hat linux fileserver (kernel version 2.4.18-14)
> from samba 2.x to samba 3.02.
> 
> After the upgrade, the special chars in windows filenames
> (German Umlaute) were no more visible to clients but either
> substituted with a little black rectangle or completely suppressed -
> depending on the client operating system (W2000/W98).

> Within the archived list I found a hint that the smb options dos/unix charset
> might not be the solution, but it could be related to kernel restrictions.

 Samba 3 uses UTF8 on the file system instead of a dos code page. If you
have lots of non ascii in your file system you either have to convert
them to UTF-8 (There are scripts around to do this), or lock the Unix
charset into the most common code page that was written to your disk.

 Using the unix charset option then 'knobbles' Samba's multi-charset
handling some what, you won't be able to put glyphs from other character
sets on Samba volumes. Better to convert unless you have Unix
application that need to access the files created by Windows users and
it depends on a certain code page being used in the file system.

 I've been using Samba 3 since it was beta, as not only were people
putting German Umlaute's in file names, but the accents used in just
about every other European language. But the people trying to use
Chinese caused much pain with Samba 2 as it plain wouldn't co-exist with
the others.

 The changeover to Samba 3 caused a little pain for those who had been
using filenames with accents but the pain was worth it to get the
European and Asian languages to co-exist on the one file server. Since I
did that people have written conversion scripts. I did it by hand,
fielding user complaints and then renaming their files. (Which they then
renamed back into what they wanted, but it was stored on the Unix side
UTF-8 now)


 Of note on Fedora Core if I do an 'ls' of a folder containing something
like Chinese put there by a Windows client, gterminal will render it
correctly...

-- 
Matthew Geier <matthew at arts.usyd.edu.au>
Arts IT Unit, Faculty of Arts, Sydney University