Chapter 27. Unicode/Charsets

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 @@ -6,14 +6,13 @@ 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/. +for all computer users, the efforts of the Openi18n organisation is deserving of +special mention.

Samba-2.x supported a single locale through a mechanism called codepages. Samba-3 is destined to become a truly 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) @@ -30,45 +29,39 @@ 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).

-A standardised multibyte charset is unicode, info is available at -www.unicode.org. -A big advantage of using a multibyte charset is that you only need one; no -need to make sure two computers use the same charset when they are + A standardised multibyte charset is unicode. +A big advantage of using a multibyte charset is that you only need one; there +is no need to make sure two computers use the same charset when they are communicating. -

Old windows clients used to use single-byte charsets, named +

Old windows clients use single-byte charsets, named 'codepages' by Microsoft. However, there is no support for 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. +have to make sure you are using the same charset when talking to an older 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 - systems. -
display charset: This is the charset samba will use to print messages + The default is UTF-8, which is fine for most + systems. The default in previous samba releases was ASCII. +
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 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 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 "$CP" | iconv -f cp850 \ - -t iso8859-15`; if [ "$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 +for the local charset used by the DOS/Windows clients.
Bjoern Jacke has written a utility named convm that can convert whole directory + structures to different charsets with one single command. +

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

+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.

Common errors

CP850.so can't be found

“Samba is complaining about a missing CP850.so file”.

CP850 is the default dos charset. The dos charset is used to convert data to the codepage used by your dos clients. If you don't have any dos clients, you can safely ignore this message.

CP850 should be supported by your local iconv implementation. Make sure you have all the required packages installed. If you compiled samba from source, make sure configure found iconv.