National character set and Samba shares

[fernando at lozano.eti.br]

Hi There,

My network contains a RHEL4 server that runs Oracle and a few Conectiva / Mandriva servers running
Samba. The problem is, when I mount the Samba shares on the RHEL machine, it can't display correctly
file names that contain national characters (almost all file names, as I am in Brazil). This is
preventing me to deploy a document management system. Swtiching to NFS is not a solution for a
number of reasons I can't discuss here.

Man pages describe the use of smbmount switches such as codepage and iocharset, but whatever
switches I give to smbmount I allways end up getting wrong file names. Using iconv I found the RHEL
machine allways sees file names encoded as CP850 (DOS code-page for western european languages). But
using iconv doesn't allows a local application on the RHEL box to open the remote files serverd from
the remote samba share.

I need the kernel on the RHEL server (or the smbfs filesystem) to convert CP850 received fom smb
packets to UTF-8 names before presenting them to applications, and vice-versa. Does anyone knows how
to do this?


[]s, Fernando Lozano