Special characters - on system and over network

[5circles]

Hello. I hope I'm asking in the right forum.

I've been doing some large scale copies from one disk to another. Some between disks on the same system, and some over the network. I noticed this problem first with a network copy, with the remote drive mounted through Nautilus (but I presume that's using Samba). I'm using Ubuntu 8.04, and the remote drives are either on Windows machines or a Linksys NAS200 - which runs Linux but has Windows shares.

Anyway, the copy using cp -dpRuv had some problems with filenames with foreign characters - accented French was what I noticed. I didn't see any problems with spaces, but these files (CD tracks created by ripping) gave errors about can't open and can't stat. This seemed odd to me since I just thought the wildcard copy would get file handles from the directory listing and request them - so the names wouldn't cause problems even if they needed escaping for a manual copy.

I've had people suggest that I eliminate the special characters, but that doesn't make too much sense to me since I'd expect to get more filenames like that from ripping, and in any case why shouldn't Linux / cp be able to deal with it.

Then I noticed that copying between disks on the same computer didn't have the problem. I've been able to do mass copies with cp or with rsync without errors.

So it looks to me like this is a networking issue. Can someone confirm that, and also tell me if there is a way round it?

Thanks
Mike

[bigtomrodney]

It sounds like the NAS is running an older version of Samba that doesn't have Unicode support. Samba 3 onwards supports unicode and shouldn't have trouble. Do you have any way of figuring out which version is running on the NAS? ssh access perhaps?

[5circles]

I don't think the issue is on the NAS200. I just tried connecting to a share on a Windows box with the same data, and get the same errors. Also, the files were stored/accessed on the NAS200 or the Windows share by Windows programs with no problems.

With a cp, I see 'No such file or directory'.

With Nautilus, I see questionmarks or black diamonds with reverse video questionmarks where these characters are.

I think is it most likely that the problem is with the way the shares are mounted by Ubuntu.

I've been trying to follow the instructions in Mount samba shares with utf8 encoding using cifs - Ubuntu Forums to see if that solves the problem, specifically

sudo mount -t cifs //netbiosname/sharename /media/sharename -o username=winusername,password=winpassword,iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777

I had to change the command to smbmount, and leave out the -t cifs to get it to work.

But the results are still the same.

If this is a Ubuntu issue, maybe I should take this to a different forum?

Thanks
Mike

[Frederic28]

To "5circles".

Hi,
I beleave you're French guy too.
So, I have the same problem and I am SURE this trouble is from "code" between the Linksys NAS200 system and Linux/ubuntu.
I ran test from a XP station without any problem with these é è ...
I test from Linux/ubuntu with filezilla ... no problem!
the problem is only when I create some file name WITH Nautilus (I didn't run test with another file manager ...)

The problem is also with Linux hidden files ".files"
Nautilus send files without error, lie filezilla. I saw the file transfert ...
after a refresh, file don't appear any more.

From the Linksys 'interface' 192.168.1.xx / my files ... I see the files are there
But ... from this GUI files are not 'managable'!

any advice is welcome
Regards

[Frederic28]

Hello,

"5Circles" was right
I had to adapt his command line to :

#! /bin/bash
mount -t smbfs -o gid=100,uid=1000,umask=002,iocharset=utf8,codepage=850,user=USER,pass=PWD '//192.168.1.77/PUBLIC DISK 1' /home/frederic/500Go

And now, my Linksys NAS200 is running for windows as Linux.
I have always a trouble with special files the ".files" which are not transfered to the NAS

any advice?