Subject: [netatalk-admins] FreeBSD 2.2.7 - stable - and netatalk strange problems

From: Capriotti <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 08 Oct 1998 22:25:18 -0300

Hello. I am a newcomer, that has just finished borwsing the list archives
of 1998 w/o great success to the problems found.

The situation: 

P166 64 MB ram
FreeBSD 2.2-stable of october/1998 (first week)
netatelk 1.4b2 - precompiled package added to the out-of-the-box system
new kernel custom built to support appletalk.
Samba

The problem:

When I copy a file from a MAc station, from it's SCSI external Zip Drive, I
get an appearently corrupted file.

I say it is apearently corrupted because it will not open on any of the
PCs, w/ Win95 or 98. but it will still open in the Macs.

The contrary is often true: Files compressed using Winzip, when inflated
will not open in the Macs.

note that it does NOT HAPPEN with ALL hte files. Only SOME of the files
suffer of this.

I tryed changing the Mac's Os version from 8 to 7.5.x, but it was of no
help. The MAc where the Zip is connected does not have the iomega
extension; It has a guest file from iomega, similar to PCs.

I am clueless

Any hints ?

TIA.

---

From: Palle Girgensohn <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 09 Oct 1998 04:07:09 +0200

Hello!

I have an idea. Do all the problem files contain non-ascii characters in
their names. Do the ones that work contain only ascii? My guess is yes.
If you check the bad files on the unix machine, they will colons (':')
in their names. Netatalk stores non-ascii character (and '/') as ':xx'
where xx is the hexadecimal representation. Not very compatible  :-(

Colon is not preferred by windos. They hate it ;-) Thus, the files won't
show up.

I did some work on this a while ago, and if you have a fresh system
(i.e. not many files copied to the shared volume) you could try my
patches. They make netatalk store filnames in iso-latin (8859-1) instead
of MacRoman. This is good if you collaborate with Samba, since samba can
also be set to this option. 

The original ones were supplied around new year (1998-01-02 or so?). If
you're interrested, I could send you a ready made port for FreeBSD on
the latest netatalk+asun appleshare/ip package. I haven't supplied it
public yet, because I haven't had the opportunity to test it. I can send
you patches tomorrow from work. Please mail me to confirm that the above
is indeed the source of the problem.

Regards,
Palle