Server 14.04 - Missing Folders with Samba

[motobeats]

Point taken on CIFS v. NFS. That said, I do have a Windows box on the network to use with some software. And Samba doesn't seem to be able to support NFS mounts without some extra work which I choose to avoid.

However, when I ssh into the file server, the offending directories appear with question marks in them. So this is a problem local to the box, not just a smb/NFS/CIFS conflict.

I did try changing my language to de_DE but that didn't help. Maybe I should have tried de_DE.iso88591? Short of it is these characters are messing up the standard filesystem commands (mv, find, etc). Using ls -b I can see they map to umlauts (374,326,366)

http://www.pjb.com.au/comp/diacritics.html

I was able to rename the folders and files with this command

$ find -inum (NUMBER HERE) -exec mv {} "NEW FILE/FOLDERNAME HERE" \;

Despite the error messages it throws it worked for me.

Doing another sweep by and to make sure I them all and then I will see if all the folders appear.

[volkswagner]

I can't remember for sure, but I think you could have filesystem corruption or a bad disk.
I say this based on the question marks you see when running ls command.

Run smartmontools/smartutil.

You could try creating the files/directories with similar names/characters on an ext4 formatted USB drive to see if the
problem can be reproduced.

[motobeats]

Definitely not any type of corruption. After renaming the offending folder/filenames, I am able to navigate them and play the music files without issue.

I'm pretty sure the question mark is just signifying that the terminal does not know how to handle that character. When I use ls -b, the terminal prints the unicode for the character instead of the question mark.

[motobeats]

All fixed! Here is a quick recap of the issue, failed attempts to fix, and the workaround.

Problem: My music folders, when moved from my Windows laptop (note that my folders were managed by iTunes) to my Ubuntu server contained unicode characters that my terminal could not display (here is a list: http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~tomw/java/unicode.html). Specifically, my terminal had an issue with characters that used an accent over vowels (umlauts, etc.). At best, this caused the folders to be unreadable (locally could not manipulate them or import the music within the folder into Banshee). At worst, it caused other folders with "safe" names to not appear (this happened when navigating to the folder over smb from my Mint 17 laptop or my Windows 7 desktop). My phone handled the situation better and simply skipped the ~6 offending folders as opposed to Mint/Windows which ended up skipping ~1,000 of the 1,140 folders because those clients didn't know how to handle the 6 offending folders.

Failed attempts: Manipulating the folders in a traditional manner was not possible as I could not type the name with my settings and the terminal would not have recognized it anyway. Changing my LANG variable did not help either.

Solution: Using ls -b I was able to display the offending folders with printable characters. I then renamed them by hand using this command.

First, cd to the directory then ls -lib to find the inode number then find -inum (NUMBER) -exec mv {} "(NEW_NAME" \;

I get error messages when I run the command but it seems to work. Having the folder/file to be changed within the pwd is important.

After renaming all of the folders and files, all music is now visible and importing into Banshee. Additionally, Mint is now able to see all 1,140 folders over smb.

Thanks all for your help on things to look into.

[motobeats]

Would be great if the client side handled this situation more like my phone and skipped the folders as needed instead of the behavior exhibited. Maybe not a bug but certainly a place for improvement.

Thoughts?