As a follow up, Unicode builds of OpenAFS for Windows are now available for private testing on all 32-bit and 64-bit Windows operating systems. I am seeking individuals and organizations that wish they could usenon-ascii characters in their file and directory names to perform testing. Sites making use of roaming profiles and folder redirection
to AFS volumes are especially desired.
We would also like to hear from users that make use of Hebrew, Arabic, and any of the CJK languages. File and directory names making use of any Unicode included characters should work. Please contact me off list to obtain access to the builds. I believe they are ready for production use but want to obtain confirmation before we start to issue official releases. On a technical note, the OAFW cache manager now stores file namesas UTF-16 strings within the SMB, DNLC, and Btree modules. Normalization is only used for lookup in the DNLC and Btree modules.
Normalized names are never sent to the file server nor displayed to the end user. Note 1: There is no Unicode normalization support for Windows 2000. As a result it is possible for a name in the directory to be visible and yet be impossible to access. In fact, attempts to create a file of the same name will in fact result in a second file being created with a different combination of Unicode code points. Note 2: The fonts that ship with U.S. versions of Windows prior to Vista are quite poorly populated. The result is that many valid Unicode names cannot be displayed as anything but substitution characters. Thanks to Asanka Herath for much of the hard work that has gone into making this transition. Jeffrey Altman Jeffrey Altman wrote:
Secure Endpoints has been working on adding Unicode support to the Windows cache manager. What we have done is updated the SMB Server to process Unicode names in UTF-16. All UTF-16 strings are then converted to UTF-8 for storage within the cache manager and when storing to the AFS file server. This will be interoperable with all UNIX/Linux platforms that use UTF-8 as the locale. We are going to update fs.exe and the explorer shell extension to send tagged UTF-8 file names over the pioctl interface. This way the cache manager can distinguish between UTF-8 and ANSI character strings in case a system has applications on the system other than those that ship with OpenAFS that make use of the pioctl() interface. Such as JPSoftware's 4NT or Take Command. We also plan to add an "fs smbunicode" function to permit the SMB Server to be transitioned between Unicode and OEM modes. This might be necessary to assist in accessing file names that are currently 8-bit OEM that will no longer be accessible via Unicode. I don't have a good way for end users to translate names from OEM to UTF-8. I have private builds available for 32-bit Windows that now speak Unicode. If you are in an organization that makes use of Unicode object names and can help in testing. Please contact me privately. Thanks. Jeffrey Altman
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