Originally published March 1, 2017 @ 1:16 am
This is probably old news to most of you, but I just found out: Samba v 3.5+ has a new option for flexible mapping of filename characters. Unix filenames allow certain characters that Windows filename cannot have. Things like colon, single quote, question mark and some others.
The following options can be added to your smb.conf to enable this feature:
vfs objects = catia catia:mappings = 0x22:0xa8,0x2a:0xa4,0x2f:0xf8,0x3a:0xf7,0x3c:0xab,0x3e:0xbb,0x3f:0xbf,0x5c:0xff,0x7c:0xa6
This would turn a Unix “Is this a Joke?.txt” into “Is this a Joke¿.txt” on Windows, etc. Filename integrity would be preserved on Unix and accessible From Windows. In older versions of Samba, the “weird” filename would have appeared as “ITHSJO~1” or something like that to the Windows users.
I wish this was an option when I used to support Catia as the file-naming convention differences used to be endless source of entertainment.
Experienced Unix/Linux System Administrator with 20-year background in Systems Analysis, Problem Resolution and Engineering Application Support in a large distributed Unix and Windows server environment. Strong problem determination skills. Good knowledge of networking, remote diagnostic techniques, firewalls and network security. Extensive experience with engineering application and database servers, high-availability systems, high-performance computing clusters, and process automation.
