Distributing files with extended characters in the filename

  • 3477030
  • 22-Aug-2007
  • 30-Apr-2012

Environment

Novell ZENworks 6.5 Server Management - ZSM6.5 Tiered Electronic Distribution (TED)
Novell ZENworks 7 Server Management - ZSM7 Tiered Electronic Distribution (TED)

Situation

The ability of ZENworks Server Management to distribute files with filenames that contain extended characters is varies between the different platforms it can run on. ZENworks Server Management is able to handle extended characters, but in some cases it's limited due to restrictions on the OS or JAVA implementation.

Resolution

NetWare
ZENworks Server management is able to distribute files with characters from the server codepage in the filename.
JAVA on NetWare is only able to use characters that exist within the codepage used on the server, as such only these characters can be used.

Windows
ZENworks Server management is able to distribute files with Unicode characters in the filename

Linux (including OES Linux)
ZENworks Server management is able to distribute files with Unicode characters in the filename.

On some Linux systems the distribution of these files fails. When ZSM is started from the init scripts, the default character coding is passed to the JVM as 'ASCII'. The server seems to have a file encoding value of 'ASCII' during initialization, later this changes to'UTF8'.

Since the JVM was told that the encoding was ASCII, only ASCII characters can be successfully used until the JVM is restarted and picks up the correct codepage. In order to do this on startup, you can add a -Dfile.encoding="UTF8" parameter to the /opt/novell/zenworks/bin/zfs-pds file. The entire line would then look like:

env LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/novell/zenworks/lib $ZFS_JAVA_HOME/bin/java -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true -Dfile.encoding="UTF8" -Xmx512M -DXMLSecurityDir=/var/opt/novell/zenworks/security -classpath $ZFSCLASSPATH com.novell.application.zenworks.loader.ZENLoader /etc/opt/novell/zenworks/zfs-startup.xml >/dev/null 2>&1 & echo $! > /var/opt/novell/zenworks/zfs-pds.pid