[Samba] XP Clients Showing Incorrect Filenames

[Jeremy Allison]

On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 11:01:36AM -0500, Andy Theuninck wrote:
> I'm seeing something fairly odd where XP clients show some - but not
> nearly all -filenames as a random jumble of characters. The files are
> still perfectly accessible; if I tell windows manually what the file
> type is, they'll open.
> 
> I don't think it's a character set issue. Affected filenames contain
> alphanumeric characters (a-zA-z, no accents or anything outside
> ASCII), periods, and hyphens. It doesn't seem like any sort of
> client-side caching. I tried a couple different client machines that
> have never accessed the share before and they see the same incorrect
> names. This seems to happen only in directories with a large number of
> files (500+), but that could be coincidental. The problem always
> affects a handful of files in the directory rather than all files.
> 
> The odd file names all look like "AH6I10~Z". Besides the tilde always
> being 2nd to last, the other characters don't have any consistent
> mapping to the actual file name.

Oh how soon we forget :-). Google for DOS 8.3 filename limitation :-).

Remember there are some filenames (containing a : character etc.) that
Windows can't use.

Jeremy.