turn off codepages

Ron Alexander rcalex at home.com
Mon May 8 22:12:23 GMT 2000


THANK YOU!

That was not at all obvious to me. I bet it's documented somewhere and I
missed it.

My apologies for the wasted bandwidth, and my thanks for the pointer.

Regards,
Ron Alexander

-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Langasek [mailto:vorlon at netexpress.net]
Sent: May 8, 2000 6:08 PM
To: Ron Alexander
Cc: Multiple recipients of list SAMBA-TECHNICAL
Subject: RE: turn off codepages


On Tue, 9 May 2000, Ron Alexander wrote:

> I am confused (not unusual).

> If Samba does NOT support codepages, why is there:
> 1. code that spews out diagnostics
> 2. a codepage directory
> etc.

> In other words, can it be somehow configured out?

> I just checked the Makefile.in and there are about 10 references to either
> the codepage dir, supported codepages or code to do with codepages. NONE
of
> it is conditional in the Makefile.in.

> If as you say "AFAIK no platform that SAMBA runs on supports codepages."
> then what do they do to get rid of the diagnostic msgs?

> Here is the diagnostic I am talking about.

> [2000/05/08 13:54:00, 0] charset.c:(228)
>   load_client_codepage: file /system/samba/codepages/codepage.437 is an
> incorrect size for a code page file (size=0).

> It might seem like a nit, but I know somebody in the user community will
> call me at 4:00 in the afternoon. The problem is, they will be in
Singapore.

All of the codepage support is internal to Samba: there is no codepage
support in the underlying OS.  All of the codepage files that you see
Samba complaining about are supposed to be generated by a utility that's
included with Samba.

The problem is that even though Unices don't support codepages, Microsoft
clients do, and in fact depend on them for proper display of filenames.
The codepage support is used in order to convert from the OS's native
character set (usually something like ISO-8859-* or a Unicode variant)
to a codepage that can be understood by Windows.

So the answer to the question "what do they do to get rid of the
diagnostic messages?" is that they build the make_smbcodepage utility
from the Samba distro and use it to populate the codepage directory.

HTH,
Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer



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