Further to my last post, in which it was discovered that the NFS client tool included in some editions of Windows 7 can’t cope with accented characters (or anything not in the standard American view of the alphabet, really)…
The good news is that I have a fix. The bad news is that it comes in the form of a commercial NFS client, called ProNFS, which costs US$40. That’s at least $15 more than I feel entirely comfortable paying, but there’s a 30-day trialware edition that at least you can test stuff out with before you part with your hard-earned moolah.
Crucially, in the client settings tool that is provided as part of the ProNFS software stack, there’s this little dialog box:
Spot the reference to using UTF8 file names! Woot!
Once you then use the ‘map drive’ tool to find your NFS shares and mount them as a standard windows drive letter affair, everything works as advertised on the tin-lid:
Spot all those European names displaying correctly, replete with accents, umlauts and cedillas! Problem solved, I think.
I do have a few “issues” with this approach to solving the problem, though. I suppose the first one is simply this: “if they can do it, why can’t you, Microsoft?!”. The second is that the installer for this program looks like it was written in 1994 and hasn’t been updated since! There are lots of little touches on the company’s website, for example, that make me nervous -constant references to the software being compatible with Vista, for example, with never a mention of Windows 7. If you check out their promotional screenshot, too, it will seem as if the software hasn’t been updated since 2003! They’re shooting themselves in the foot there, because if you actually run the NFS server component today, it will report version 1.6 with a compile date of June 23rd 2011, which is much more reassuring! Finally, there’s the not-so-minor matter of the Blue Screen of Death I got when I removed the evaluation version and performed post-removal reboot. I haven’t seen one of those for years, so getting one as the software is removed didn’t fill me with warm glows and kindly feelings!
In the end, though, such things are probably not major issues. I should say in fairness that once the software was installed and running, it behaved itself perfectly -and I can live with slightly out-of-date documentation and promotional wares so long as the software behaves itself. Yes, I could wish it were a tad cheaper, but even at US$40, if it means I don’t have to configure Samba, it’s probably just about worth it! Colour me happy, ish.