Missing files with non-UTF8 filenames on volume mount

Ben's Corner

2020-02-07

I’ve had trouble on a server with handling non-UTF8 filenames. No matter what I used, ls, vi, touch, I could not find non-UTF8 files created on another server.

This was a problem with the volume mount. On the server with working filenames, the mount was NFSv3, which does support other encodings. NFSv4, as used by the mount on the other server, only supports UTF-8 filenames.

One solution is to fix the mount to use NFSv3:

1	sudo mount -t nfs -o vers=3 network-drive:/path/to/folder /mnt/nfsv4

This is not always available or transparent, unfortunately. A more correct but potentially problematic solution is to convert filenames to UTF-8 using the convmv util, for example:

1	convmv -f latin8 -t utf-8 -r /mnt/nfsv3