3.28. Character Set Issues with Roaming Profiles

This section describes functionality and concerns related to pre-1.5.50 releases of OpenAFS for Windows. This release stores all file names on the file servers as Unicode encoded using UTF-8.

There is a known issue with storing Windows Roaming Profiles when the profile contains either directories or files with names which cannot be represented in the local OEM character set. In this case, attempts to write the profile back to AFS will fail during the character set conversion. The pre-1.5.50 OpenAFS Client's CIFS gateway did not support UNICODE. To avoid this problem some sites run custom logoff scripts (assigned by group policy) which rename all files to use only the supported characters for the locale.

Versions of OpenAFS for Windows 1.5.50 and above do not suffer from these issues.