I am trying to setup a linux box on which I would like to have samba sharing a vfat filesystem to users on my LAN using windows XP. The problem I face is that I can successfully create a file without accents from the windows XP client, however when I try to create a file with a accent - like 'é' or anything else - the file cannot be created. The following message is displayed in a popup window on the client machine: "Groupe de secteurs non valide." in French which means "Sectors group not valid". I have setup the smb.conf file like the followings: [global] # workgroup = NT-Domain-Name or Workgroup-Name workgroup = WORKGROUP # server string is the equivalent of the NT Description field server string = # This adds some security to avoid people connecting from outside the LAN: hosts allow = 192.168.0. 127. # all log information in one file log file = /var/log/samba/smbd.log # log level = 8 # Security mode. Most people will want user level security. See # security_level.txt for details. share or user. security = user # Most people will find that this option gives better performance. # See speed.txt and the manual pages for details socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192 # Set the interfaces that are allowed to use SMB for additionnal security: interfaces = 192.168.0.0/255.255.255.0 # DNS Proxy - tells Samba whether or not to try to resolve NetBIOS names # via DNS nslookups. The built-in default for versions 1.9.17 is yes, # this has been changed in version 1.9.18 to no. dns proxy = no winbind use default domain = no map to guest = Bad User # encrypt passwords = yes client code page = 850 character set = ISO8859-1 # A publicly accessible directory [public] comment = Public files path = /samba_public public = yes read only = no browseable = yes guest ok = yes [backups] comment = Backup dirs path = /samba_backups valid users = john force user = john create mask = 0700 directory mask = 0700 public = no writable = yes read only = no printable = no # This allows you to hide the shared path. browseable = no guest ok = yes As soon as I access the public share (which is on another filesystem - ext3), there is no problem at all. I am using samba version 3.0.10-1.4 for RHEL 4. My vfat mount options are: mount -t vfat -o uid=john,gid=samba,umask=000,iocharset=8859- 1 /dev/hdb1 /samba_backups This is reproductible. Maybe this bug is there since the beginning, I don't know. Thanks, Daniel
Sorry for the two config lines which seems obsolete: client code page = 850 character set = ISO8859-1 I replaced them with: unix charset = iso8859-1 dos charset = CP850 display charset = LOCALE But this doesn't change anything to the problem. Daniel
There are known issues when exporting vfat partitions via Samba. This seems to be another one of them. If you could reproduce this error on an ext2/3 partition, we would be more convinced that it is a Samba bug. Currently, though it appears to just be a limitation in the vfat kernel code.
Good news. I have finally found the problem with the help of the CentOS community. This is not a Samba or kernel bug. If you use CentOS 4 and newer Linux distributions, then you will need to use the following charset settings for european languages users: First put those lines in the smb.conf file: unix charset = UTF-8 dos charset = UTF-8 display charset = LOCALE And then, mount the FAT 12, 16, 32 or whatever like this: /dev/hdb1 /samba_backups vfat uid=nobody,gid=samba,umask=000,utf8 0 0 Else you can also mount it in the command line to test it: mount -t vfat -o uid=john,gid=samba,umask=000,utf8 /dev/hdb1 /samba_backups Don't forget to put the users that you want to have access to it in the 'samba' group. I have tested it and it works beautifully without any single problem. I have tested all combinations possible by writing from linux to FAT, samba to FAT, windows 95-XP to FAT and all keep the accents and long names without any problem. We can take a common FAT32 disk with all kind of long and accentuated file names and they will just appear exactly the same on the samba shared resource. It couldn't be better ! Thanks for this great Samba project and congratulations ! Regards, Daniel