NFS and NIS unicode support

File Service Administration Guide for Hitachi NAS Platform

Version
15.6.x
Audience
anonymous
Part Number
MK-92HNAS006-37
ft:lastEdition
2026-03-20

Character sets supported by the NAS server to communicate with NFS clients and NIS servers include:

Communicating with Character encodings supported Default character encoding
NFSv2 and NFSv3 clients Latin-1, UTF-8, EUC-KR, EUC-JP, and EUC-CN Latin-1
NFSv4 clients UTF-8 (for the exception, see the following note) UTF-8
NIS servers Latin-1 and UTF-8 Latin-1
Note: Communication with NFSv4 clients uses the UTF-8 character set. However if the NFS character set is configured to use EUC-KR (see Changing the character set), NFSv4 clients can be allowed to use EUC-KR instead. Contact your support organization for more information on EUC-KR support over NFSv4.

Regardless of the character encodings in use, names used for NFSv4 exports must contain only characters that can be both represented in ASCII and are valid in SMB file/directory names, which is required for shortname compatibility. Extended character support for export names is not provided.

You can specify the character encoding to be used when communicating with NFS clients and/or NIS servers using the protocol-character-set command.

The NFS character set controls:

  • File, directory, and export names to/from NFS clients. For NFSv4 clients, see the export name requirements in the previous note,
  • Symlinks to/from NFS clients.

The NIS character set controls:

  • NIS user and group names.
  • LDAP user and group names.

Character set encoding may not be set for:

  • Namespace links.
  • Namespace directories.
  • Communication with NFSv4 clients. For the exception, see the previous note.

When multi-tenancy is not enabled, the configured character encoding applies on a cluster-wide basis (all clients communicate with the server using the same encoding). When multi-tenancy is enabled, the character encoding is configured on a per-EVS basis, allowing the use of multiple character sets on the same NAS server/cluster.

To correctly display the characters during communication between the client and the NAS server, both the program used by the client to communicate with the NAS server and the NAS server itself must be configured with the same character encoding and locale.

Note: When the EUC-KR, EUC-JP, or EUC-CN character encodings are enabled for NFSv2/NFSv3 clients, there is a performance penalty for operations that are not handle-based when compared to the UTF-8 or Latin-1 character encodings. If EUC-KR character encoding is configured and EUC-KR support over NFSv4 is enabled, this performance penalty will also apply to NFSv4.