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   2 <html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"><title>Chapter 25. Unicode/Charsets</title><link rel="stylesheet" href="samba.css" type="text/css"><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.59.1"><link rel="home" href="index.html" title="SAMBA Project Documentation"><link rel="up" href="optional.html" title="Part III. Advanced Configuration"><link rel="previous" href="securing-samba.html" title="Chapter 24. Securing Samba"><link rel="next" href="locking.html" title="Chapter 26. File and Record Locking"></head><body bgcolor="white" text="black" link="#0000FF" vlink="#840084" alink="#0000FF"><div class="navheader"><table width="100%" summary="Navigation header"><tr><th colspan="3" align="center">Chapter 25. Unicode/Charsets</th></tr><tr><td width="20%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="securing-samba.html">Prev</a> </td><th width="60%" align="center">Part III. Advanced Configuration</th><td width="20%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="locking.html">Next</a></td></tr></table><hr></div><div class="chapter" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><h2 class="title"><a name="unicode"></a>Chapter 25. Unicode/Charsets</h2></div><div><div class="author"><h3 class="author">Jelmer R. Vernooij</h3><div class="affiliation"><span class="orgname">The Samba Team<br></span><div class="address"><p><tt>&lt;<a href="mailto:jelmer@samba.org">jelmer@samba.org</a>&gt;</tt></p></div></div></div></div><div><div class="author"><h3 class="author">TAKAHASHI Motonobu</h3><div class="affiliation"><div class="address"><p><tt>&lt;<a href="mailto:monyo@home.monyo.com">monyo@home.monyo.com</a>&gt;</tt></p></div></div></div></div><div><p class="pubdate">25 March 2003</p></div></div><div class="toc"><p><b>Table of Contents</b></p><dl><dt><a href="unicode.html#id2901255">What are charsets and unicode?</a></dt><dt><a href="unicode.html#id2901324">Samba and charsets</a></dt><dt><a href="unicode.html#id2901414">Conversion from old names</a></dt><dt><a href="unicode.html#id2901459">Japanese charsets</a></dt></dl></div><div class="sect1" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id2901255"></a>What are charsets and unicode?</h2></div></div><p>
   3 Computers communicate in numbers. In texts, each number will be
   4 translated to a corresponding letter. The meaning that will be assigned
   5 to a certain number depends on the <span class="emphasis"><em>character set(charset)
   6 </em></span> that is used.
   7 A charset can be seen as a table that is used to translate numbers to
   8 letters. Not all computers use the same charset (there are charsets
   9 with German umlauts, Japanese characters, etc). Usually a charset contains
  10 256 characters, which means that storing a character with it takes
  11 exactly one byte. </p><p>
  12 There are also charsets that support even more characters,
  13 but those need twice(or even more) as much storage space. These
  14 charsets can contain <b>256 * 256 = 65536</b> characters, which
  15 is more then all possible characters one could think of. They are called
  16 multibyte charsets (because they use more then one byte to
  17 store one character).
  18 </p><p>
  19 A standardised multibyte charset is unicode, info is available at
  20 <a href="http://www.unicode.org/" target="_top">www.unicode.org</a>.
  21 A big advantage of using a multibyte charset is that you only need one; no
  22 need to make sure two computers use the same charset when they are
  23 communicating.
  24 </p><p>Old windows clients used to use single-byte charsets, named
  25 'codepages' by microsoft. However, there is no support for
  26 negotiating the charset to be used in the smb protocol. Thus, you
  27 have to make sure you are using the same charset when talking to an old client.
  28 Newer clients (Windows NT, 2K, XP) talk unicode over the wire.
  29 </p></div><div class="sect1" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id2901324"></a>Samba and charsets</h2></div></div><p>
  30 As of samba 3.0, samba can (and will) talk unicode over the wire. Internally,
  31 samba knows of three kinds of character sets:
  32 </p><div class="variablelist"><dl><dt><span class="term">unix charset</span></dt><dd><p>
  33                 This is the charset used internally by your operating system.
  34                 The default is <tt>ASCII</tt>, which is fine for most
  35                 systems.
  36                 </p></dd><dt><span class="term">display charset</span></dt><dd><p>This is the charset samba will use to print messages
  37                 on your screen. It should generally be the same as the <b>unix charset</b>.
  38                 </p></dd><dt><span class="term">dos charset</span></dt><dd><p>This is the charset samba uses when communicating with
  39                 DOS and Windows 9x clients. It will talk unicode to all newer clients.
  40                 The default depends on the charsets you have installed on your system.
  41                 Run <b>testparm -v | grep &quot;dos charset&quot;</b> to see
  42                 what the default is on your system.
  43                 </p></dd></dl></div></div><div class="sect1" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id2901414"></a>Conversion from old names</h2></div></div><p>Because previous samba versions did not do any charset conversion,
  44 characters in filenames are usually not correct in the unix charset but only
  45 for the local charset used by the DOS/Windows clients.</p><p>The following script from Steve Langasek converts all
  46 filenames from CP850 to the iso8859-15 charset.</p><p>
  47 <tt>#</tt><b><tt>find <i><tt>/path/to/share</tt></i> -type f -exec bash -c 'CP=&quot;{}&quot;; ISO=`echo -n &quot;$CP&quot; | iconv -f cp850 \
  48   -t iso8859-15`; if [ &quot;$CP&quot; != &quot;$ISO&quot; ]; then mv &quot;$CP&quot; &quot;$ISO&quot;; fi' \;
  49 </tt></b>
  50 </p></div><div class="sect1" lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a name="id2901459"></a>Japanese charsets</h2></div></div><p>Samba doesn't work correctly with Japanese charsets yet. Here are
  51 points of attention when setting it up:</p><div class="itemizedlist"><ul type="disc"><li><p>You should set <b>mangling method =
  52 hash</b></p></li><li><p>There are various iconv() implementations around and not
  53 all of  them work equally well. glibc2's iconv() has a critical problem
  54 in CP932.  libiconv-1.8 works with CP932 but still has some problems and
  55 does not  work with EUC-JP.</p></li><li><p>You should set <b>dos charset = CP932</b>, not
  56 Shift_JIS, SJIS...</p></li><li><p>Currently only <b>unix charset = CP932</b>
  57 will work (but still has some problems...) because of iconv() issues.
  58 <b>unix charset = EUC-JP</b> doesn't work well because of
  59 iconv() issues.</p></li><li><p>Currently Samba 3.0 does not support <b>unix charset
  60 = UTF8-MAC/CAP/HEX/JIS*</b></p></li></ul></div><p>More information (in Japanese) is available at: <a href="http://www.atmarkit.co.jp/flinux/special/samba3/samba3a.html" target="_top">http://www.atmarkit.co.jp/flinux/special/samba3/samba3a.html</a>.</p></div></div><div class="navfooter"><hr><table width="100%" summary="Navigation footer"><tr><td width="40%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="securing-samba.html">Prev</a> </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="u" href="optional.html">Up</a></td><td width="40%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="locking.html">Next</a></td></tr><tr><td width="40%" align="left" valign="top">Chapter 24. Securing Samba </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="h" href="index.html">Home</a></td><td width="40%" align="right" valign="top"> Chapter 26. File and Record Locking</td></tr></table></div></body></html>