In the past, I always had problems with SLES and our Tivoli Storage Manager client’s when backing up files with german umlauts. Well, today I looked a bit harder, and quite quickly found a solution.

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sles9 root [0] > env | grep ^LC
LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8

As you can see from the above, SLES9/10 ain’t setting LANG or LC_ALL (which I searched for first), but is setting LC_CTYPE.

So, simply changing the LC_CTYPE in the init-script and/or prepending the dsmc command line with a new LC_CTYPE fixes my umlauts problems!

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sles9 root [0] > LC_CTYPE="en_US" dsmc incr

Well, I had a long’ish talk with one of my trustworthy IBM senior consultants the day after writing this …

He told me something along the lines of this:

If you would like to back up files with names containing characters with a code > 127 please ensure that you have chosen a SBCS character set for your locale. The default code page C or the code page POSIX supports characters up to 127 only. Files whose names contain special characters will be skipped if C or POSIX is used. It is strongly recommended to perform a system backup by using a SBCS character set to prevent any file or directory from being skipped. This behavior for different locales is intended.

And this:

The UTF-8 locale is default on some Linux platforms. However, TSM Client currently does not support running under UTF-8 locales (such as en_US.UTF-8 and ja_JP.UTF-😎. Export your LANG and LC_ALL environment variables to the iso8859-1 or EUC versions of your locale and then start a new xterm (or mlterm) session prior to running TSM Client.

That basically means, at least for using the TSM Client Java Interface (dsmj) and the scheduler/client acceptor daemon you have to switch your locales to something _ not_ UTF-8 capable.

He also mentioned, that IBM doesn’t have a real solution for this problem, as well that there is no real workaround. You need to invest some time into figuring out the " right" locale setting for your system(s), since after writing the above I came to the result that it ain’t enough ..

You need to do the following:

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lang="de_DE@euro"
export LC_CTYPE="$lang"
export LANG="$lang"
export LC_ALL="$lang"

After doing so, the scheduler and the command-line client works …