NFS Shares, iTunes, and non-ASCII characters

[ppmax]

I have an NFS share with my iTunes music library. Being a man of the world I have numerous albums/songs contains non ASCII characters (things like ś and and , etc). The NFS share is automounted on multiple OS X machines, and each client install of iTunes points to the NFS iTunes library.

Files with these crazy characters in the file names can't be played, and these files also fail to synch to my iPhone. Is there any way to force UTF8 on the server or client machines so these files can get served?

Bonus question: for those using AFP, do you explicitly set the sharing charset to UTF8 or UTF8-MAC?

Thx much
PP

 

[babča]

A not-so-nice, but working solution would be to use SMB instead of NFS to access your shares. There is an incompatibility / difference in UTF8 encoding of non-ascii chars on Mac vs. rest of the world (see https://discussions.apple.com/message/10179275?messageID=10179275#10179275?messageID=10179275 and https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2680002?start=0&tstart=0), and unfortunately NFS client on OS X doesn't handle this.
Btw. files and folders created od renamed in Finder works ok, because the name is then encoded in NFD character format by Finder.

I'd like to use NFS, because it's about 60% faster then SMB in my case. Any solutions on this?

 

[ppmax]

Thanks for the reply.

I've seen that thread you linked to...but a few more experiments leads me to believe this isn't an NFS only issue, rather the ability to store files on ZFS with support for UTF8 file names. I removed my NFS share and set up an AFP share and set the sharing character set to UTF8--I could then browse to these folders and play the MP3s that previously were inaccessible.

However, I stumbled upon this post on the OSX-ZFS google group:
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/zfs-macos/5fQuQ0fnaxE

This seems to imply that when creating ZFS datasets one can add a few switches to support UTF8 filenames and normalize names that may be outside the UTF8 domain.

If this is true, it seems like it would be good practice to pass in these options when creating datasets on FreeNAS.

Now I have to decide if I want to:
a) rename all offending filenames in my iTunes library
b) destroy my dataset and try again with the options listed in the link above.

Any suggestions?
thx
PP

 

[louisk]

I have an NFS share with my iTunes music library. Being a man of the world I have numerous albums/songs contains non ASCII characters (things like ś and and , etc). The NFS share is automounted on multiple OS X machines, and each client install of iTunes points to the NFS iTunes library.

Files with these crazy characters in the file names can't be played, and these files also fail to synch to my iPhone. Is there any way to force UTF8 on the server or client machines so these files can get served?

Bonus question: for those using AFP, do you explicitly set the sharing charset to UTF8 or UTF8-MAC?

Thx much
PP

I just went through a round of testing with this. I had the wild idea of automounting the music volume over NFS for iTunes. Initially, it worked fine. When I got about 60G of music in it, it would get really slow, additional imports (I still had 140G to go) would cause iTunes to hang for long periods of time, or just hang all together. I tried several times wiping things out and starting over. Same results. Then I decided to use AFP (don't use more than one method of access or you can f* something up with naming and access). I made a symbolic link (on terminal, ln -s /path/to/afp /Users/$user/Music/iTunes) from the Music share to where iTunes stores information and files. I then proceeded to import music. I ran in chunks of about 20G. Not once did I have an issue of iTunes becoming unresponsive or freezing. I also don't have the issue of what names do or don't show up properly for the mac since all access to the music share is via AFP.

 

[ppmax]

Thanks for the reply and information. I rebuilt my iTunes library, then moved some data around to different directories and my problems went away. Im wondering if I was seeing some name mangling because due to AFP and NFS sharing collision. I had one share like this:
NFS
Share path: /foo/bar/

AFP:
Share path: /foo/

Anyways, thanks for the replies and feedback.

PP