Home > Storage > Unity XT > Storage Admin > Dell Unity: NAS Capabilities > Internationalization
On Dell Unity file systems, file and folder names are stored on disk using Unicode UTF-8 encoding and Unicode names are presented for use on the network. NFSv4 clients only use UTF-8 in filenames. Modern SMB clients will use Unicode UTF-8 for file and folder names, but in SMB, part of the session negotiation can go to one of several Microsoft code pages to ensure compatibility over the network with file name encoding from older national Windows variants (which still use non-UTF-8 alphabets in their storage).
However, both NFSv3 and FTP protocols have no means of negotiating name-encoding in the protocol. Most modern Linux clients use UTF-8 so they are compatible with Dell Unity. But some older UNIX and Linux clients use the filename encoding that is specified in their system’s ‘locale’ variables, and those alphabets can be very different from UTF-8. Most alphabets are compatible in the first 7-bits, or 127 characters, so you may not see errors on simple filenames which use only the old ASCII-character subset. Such clients often use one of the ISO-standard alphabets, usually one of the ISO-8859 series.
Clients using the 8859-x format can connect, read, and write filenames but some of their internationalized characters may not be displayed properly. In some cases, it is very difficult to have all the clients upgrade their ‘locale’ to a version that uses Unicode. To support these clients, a per-server translator must be configured to translate filenames from 8859-x (network format) to UTF-8 (disk format) since a per-session translation is not available. OE version 4.3 includes the ability to configure a code page for NFSv3 and FTP clients. This is only required for NFSv3 and FTP clients since the protocol has no method of translation.
The vdm.codepage parameter can be configured to:
The CP949 (EUC-KR) encoding option is available Starting with OE version 5.1 and later. CP949 is a variable-width code page to represent Korean text using two coded character sets. If CP949 is configured and the NAS server is replicated, it is highly recommended to ensure the replication destination system is also running Dell Unity OE 5.1 and later. If the destination is running an earlier Dell Unity OE version, CP949 is not available and the default setting of UTF-8 is used instead. If a failover occurs, characters may not be displayed properly. If a failback and a resync happens, the UTF-8 setting on the destination replicates back and overwrites the CP949 setting on the original source.
This setting does not affect NFSv4 and Windows clients as they always use UTF-8 or Unicode. It is highly recommended to configure this parameter prior to migrating or writing any NFSv3 data from another system on to Dell Unity. Otherwise, the names of existing files containing internationalized characters are not recognized. If the parameter is changed, all NFSv3 and FTP clients connecting to this NAS server also need be configured for the same encoding type. Correctly configuring this setting also allows the other types of clients (NFSv4, SMB, or SFTP) to see the same filenames as the NFSv3 and FTP clients, including the correct internationalized characters.
For more information about NAS server parameters and how to configure them, reference the Service Commands document on Dell Technologies Info Hub.