I have some Macintosh files backed up on an external NTFS-formatted hard drive.  I generally leave this drive connected to a Windows XP pc.  I tried to copy a directory from this drive to my brand-new unRAID box (obviously over SMB), and encountered a filename error, where a file could not be copied because its name contained an illegal character (which I think was the trademark "tm" symbol).

 

Short of renaming files, is there a solution to this problem?

The limitation is not a ReiserFS limit. The only characters not allowed in ReiserFS is '/' and the NULL character.

 

But... There may be limits on characters allowed in SAMBA.

I seem to remember there was a smb.conf option you can add to map certain characters to other ones. Maybe check the samba documentation to see if it has such a thing.

Alright, a little more homework, and here's what happened:

 

-External NTFS drive connected to Mac.  (Mac has Paragon NTFS for Mac installed, so it can write to NTFS volumes.)  -I copied files to the external drive.

-Later, I connected this external drive to a PC.  From the PC I tried to copy the Mac files to the unRAID.  That's when I got the illegal character "tm" message.

-Removed the external from the PC, connected it back up to Mac, connected to unRAID from Mac and copied the files no problem.

 

So maybe it's a difference in the SMB stack implementation on Mac -vs- PC. 

In any case, it copied over.  Done!

It may have been a limitation of the Windows OS Client. A note I found related to NTFS says "Microsoft Windows: Windows kernel forbids the use of characters in range 1-31 (i.e., 0x01-0x1F) and characters " * : < > ? \ / |." Perhaps there are other limitations as well.