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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) that is used. A charset can be seen as a table that is used to translate numbers to letters. Not all computers use the same charset (there are charsets with German umlauts, Japanese characters, etc). Usually a charset contains 256 characters, which means that storing a character with it takes 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 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 communicating.
Old windows clients used to 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. Newer clients (Windows NT, 2K, XP) talk unicode over the wire.
As of samba 3.0, samba can (and will) talk unicode over the wire. Internally, samba knows of three kinds of character sets:
This is the charset used internally by your operating system. The default is ASCII, which is fine for most systems.
This is the charset samba will use to print messages on your screen. It should generally be the same as the unix 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.
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' \;
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 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.