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Æ Ø Å charset problem in Tivoli client
Problem:
Tivoli client on Linux gives me this error message in the logs when it comes across a file with a Danish æ ø or å character generated on a non UTF-8 character set.
'file-name-with-æ-in-it' contains one or more unrecognised characters and is not valid.
Solution:
- Install the en_US.ISO-8859-1 locale - on Debian this is done by running dpkg-reconfigure locales.
- Insert in your /etc/init.d/dsmcad or whatever startup script for dsmcad you have: export LANG=en_US; export LC_ALL=en_US.
- Restart dsmcad.
Explanation:
The en_US.ISO-8859-1 is a so called single byte character set (SBCS) and will thus work independent of how many actual bytes used on a character in whatever charset the file name was made with. If you use a charset with more than a single byte per character, it goes wrong as soon as you have a file name not created with that same character set. It is possible to find this on IBMs web page but they seem to assume that you know what a SBCS is and which locales that are SBCSs.
Footnote
Yes I can run Tivoli client on Debian by running alien on the RPM packages. Since I run on a 64 bit system I had to go by a 32 bit system to build the alien packages and then use some force options to install. I am not impressed. They could bother to build 64 bit RPMS for Redhat, at least. But the point is: Yes, it works.