Chapter 25. Unicode/Charsets

Jelmer R. Vernooij

The Samba Team

<jelmer@samba.org>

TAKAHASHI Motonobu

<monyo@home.monyo.com>

25 March 2003

Table of Contents

What are charsets and unicode?
Samba and charsets
Conversion from old names
Japanese charsets

What are charsets and unicode?

+Chapter 27. Unicode/Charsets

Chapter 27. Unicode/Charsets
Prev	Part III. Advanced Configuration	Next

Chapter 27. Unicode/Charsets

Jelmer R. Vernooij

The Samba Team

<jelmer@samba.org>

TAKAHASHI Motonobu

<monyo@home.monyo.com>

25 March 2003

Table of Contents

Features and Benefits
What are charsets and unicode?
Samba and charsets
Conversion from old names
Japanese charsets

Features and Benefits

+Every industry eventually matures. One of the great areas of maturation is in +the focus that has been given over the past decade to make it possible for anyone +anywhere to use a computer. It has not always been that way, in fact, not so long +ago it was common for software to be written for exclusive use in the country of +origin. +

+Of all the effort that has been brought to bear on providing native language support +for all computer users, the efforts of the Openi18n organisation is deserving of +special mention. For more information about Openi18n please refer to: +http://www.openi18n.org/. +

+Samba-2.x supported a single locale through a mechanism called +codepages. Samba-3 is destined to become a truely trans-global +file and printer sharing platform. +

What are charsets and unicode?

Computers communicate in numbers. In texts, each number will be translated to a corresponding letter. The meaning that will be assigned to a certain number depends on the character set(charset) @@ -11,7 +26,7 @@ with German umlauts, Japanese characters, etc). Usually a charset contains exactly one byte.

There are also charsets that support even more characters, but those need twice(or even more) as much storage space. These -charsets can contain 256 * 256 = 65536 characters, which +charsets can contain 256 * 256 = 65536 characters, which is more then all possible characters one could think of. They are called multibyte charsets (because they use more then one byte to store one character). @@ -26,35 +41,35 @@ communicating. negotiating the charset to be used in the smb protocol. Thus, you have to make sure you are using the same charset when talking to an old client. Newer clients (Windows NT, 2K, XP) talk unicode over the wire. -

Samba and charsets

As of samba 3.0, samba can (and will) talk unicode over the wire. Internally, samba knows of three kinds of character sets: -

unix charset

unix charset: This is the charset used internally by your operating system. - The default is ASCII, which is fine for most + The default is ASCII, which is fine for most systems. -
display charset: This is the charset samba will use to print messages - on your screen. It should generally be the same as the unix charset. -
dos charset: This is the charset samba uses when communicating with +
display charset: This is the charset samba will use to print messages + on your screen. It should generally be the same as the unix charset. +
dos charset: This is the charset samba uses when communicating with DOS and Windows 9x clients. It will talk unicode to all newer clients. The default depends on the charsets you have installed on your system. - Run testparm -v | grep "dos charset" to see + Run testparm -v | grep "dos charset" to see what the default is on your system. -

Conversion from old names

Because previous samba versions did not do any charset conversion, +

Conversion from old names

Because previous samba versions did not do any charset conversion, characters in filenames are usually not correct in the unix charset but only for the local charset used by the DOS/Windows clients.

The following script from Steve Langasek converts all filenames from CP850 to the iso8859-15 charset.

-#find /path/to/share -type f -exec bash -c 'CP="{}"; ISO=`echo -n "$CP" | iconv -f cp850 \ +#find /path/to/share -type f -exec bash -c 'CP="{}"; ISO=`echo -n "$CP" | iconv -f cp850 \ -t iso8859-15`; if [ "$CP" != "$ISO" ]; then mv "$CP" "$ISO"; fi' \; -

`Japanese charsets`

Samba doesn't work correctly with Japanese charsets yet. Here are -points of attention when setting it up:

You should set mangling method = -hash
There are various iconv() implementations around and not +

`Japanese charsets`

Samba doesn't work correctly with Japanese charsets yet. Here are +points of attention when setting it up:

You should set mangling method = +hash
There are various iconv() implementations around and not all of them work equally well. glibc2's iconv() has a critical problem in CP932. libiconv-1.8 works with CP932 but still has some problems and -does not work with EUC-JP.
You should set dos charset = CP932, not -Shift_JIS, SJIS...
Currently only unix charset = CP932 +does not work with EUC-JP.
You should set dos charset = CP932, not +Shift_JIS, SJIS...
Currently only unix charset = CP932 will work (but still has some problems...) because of iconv() issues. -unix charset = EUC-JP doesn't work well because of -iconv() issues.
Currently Samba 3.0 does not support unix charset -= UTF8-MAC/CAP/HEX/JIS*

More information (in Japanese) is available at: http://www.atmarkit.co.jp/flinux/special/samba3/samba3a.html.

Prev	Up	Next
Chapter 24. Securing Samba	Home	Chapter 26. File and Record Locking

+unix charset = EUC-JP doesn't work well because of +iconv() issues. Currently Samba 3.0 does not support unix charset += UTF8-MAC/CAP/HEX/JIS*

More information (in Japanese) is available at: http://www.atmarkit.co.jp/flinux/special/samba3/samba3a.html.

Prev	Up	Next
Chapter 26. Integrating MS Windows networks with Samba	Home	Chapter 28. Samba Backup Techniques