narional characters support in SAMBA

[Leszek Boroch <ataraid@…>]

Hi,

I've started using eBox recently. Great work guys. Here's the problem and solution
proposition. I'm not a pearl programmer, so couldn't do that myself :(

It is imposible to store files with national characters in folders shared with SAMBA. They are converted to "_". Solution depends on two factors: charset used on eBox server, and charset used on client (Windows machine). Coresponding info must be placed in [global] section of smb.conf

In eBox language is choosen in main settings page. It changes language in web interface and system LC_* variables, but LOCALE is not set. It is used in smb.conf:

[global]
unix charset = LOCALE

Even if this would be set, it is not enough to do the job. There should be two more options properly set. In my case (Polish language) this should look like this:

[global]
unix charset = ISO8859-2
display charset = ISO08859-2
dos charset = 852

So my proposition is to add posibility to set those variables from web interface (simple inputs or dropdowns with list of available charsets) and put them in eBox settings database to be available by templates and backups. I've added them manually, but after eBox update they were lost, and all national characters in filenames stored by users were lost too :(((

In theory those settings are language dependant, but... I'm not sure if always. Better solution could be moving all system to UTF-8 but... stays problem with client encoding (dos charset). It depends on Windows version and language settings. I think we can safely assume that all users in certain location use the same Win version (eg. we use Polish version of Windows witch uses CP1250 and CP852 in dos prompt). For now I think simple inputs could be enough. And it shouldn't be hard to implement (new version is comming, so how not to lose filenames again?)

Sorry if this writing is messy or not clear enough.

Leszek Boroch

[juruen@…]

Hi Leszek

Thanks a lot for such a detailed description. I guess to get it done quickly we will go with options on the web interface.

I'm afraid it won't make it to the next release due in a few days. But it will for next one.

Thanks a lot