Hi list,
Some of the special characters like :?!| need character mapping in the
cifs filesharing protocol in order to work well with different software
plattforms (Windows mostly). The only exception to character mapping
were the so called "unix extensions", which allowed a unix system to
share and save those characters unchanged on the server. Unix extensions
got dropped with cifs version 2.
I kept using cifs version 1 with unix extension for quite some time now,
and would like to leave it in favor of Debian Bookworm samba defaults
for a Linux only environment. I don't use "very old servers" like the
device message error does hint, I simply never figured out an acceptable
mix of smb.conf and mount.cifs parameters, that made special character
conversion happen in a convincing fashion. I usually ended up with a
perfectly fine representation of the special characters on the cifs
client side, but the unicode mapped characters on the server are making
it cumbersome to find or handle (like copy or rename) those particular
files on the server side (via ssh sessions or a server terminal if one
is available).
My servers are usually headless systems of Debian stable, the underlying
file share filesystem on the server is BTRFS using mount defaults and
the mkfs.btrfs defaults of Debian stable. What I might miss is some
vital terminal handling software I'm not aware of. I usually start with
a minimalistic Debian installation and add locales, console-setup and
console-data to improve the headless system's language support and it's
terminal. I never came across missed characters from foreign languages,
so the language setup is not to blame either.
To sum up my problem in a simple question: is this server side
experience an expected disadvantage of using reserved characters to
begin with? From what my google research is telling me, 8 out of 10
people are discouraging the excessive use of special characters in
filenames to begin with. But since it works well on the client side it
could be represented similar on the server side?
I'm not subscribed to the list, so please CC me on your reply.
Regards,
Tuxo
