[Samba] Charset problems, for the first time

Christian Pernegger
2007-01-09T11:06:25Z

Hi list!

I've been using Samba (as packaged in Debian) for years without any
charset conversion issus, but now one bit me:

Server:
Samba 3.0.23d-2 (Debian testing),
system locale en_US.UTF-8, no charset options in smb.conf specified

Client-DE: MS Windows XP Pro SP2 German, locale for non-Unicode apps
set to German / Austria

Client-JP: MS Windows XP Pro SP2 German, locale for non-Unicode apps
set to Japanese

There's a few clients of the former type, the single client of the
latter type is a recent addition, needed for a few Japanese legacy
apps. Now the Samba server and this last machine obviously do not like
each other:

- Client-JP can't open anything on server that is extended latin-1:
trying to open "?bung 1" yields "Ubung 1 - file not found.

- file names display correctly but somehow are coded differently:
creating a folder titled "???" via Windows Explorer works, and the
folder displays correctly in a shell on the server, but can't be
deleted via shell because it isn't found. If I create the ??? folder
via command line it doesn't show up on the samba share at all, but can
be removed again from command line.

- interestingly, Japanese files work fine on Client-JP

- Clients-DE have none of the above problems (except the fact that my
legacy apps won't run)

All this leads me to believe that samba and Windows do not actually
use (the right?) Unicode variant to exchange file names. Quite
possibly this is Windows' fault but I'd appreciate some help
nonetheless :)

Regards,

Christian