HP B6960-96035, Concepts Manual

Page: 341 / 422

File name handling
Handling file names in a heterogeneous environment (different operating systems
with different local settings, all in one cell) is a significant challenge. Data Protector
handles file names under various local settings (such as language, territory, and
character sets) that were in effect on the system when the file names have been
created. File names that have been backed up using some locale settings and then
viewed or restored using different locale settings, require a specific setup to be
displayed correctly.
Background
Different platform vendors have chosen to support different sets of languages using
a variety of character set representations or character encoding standards, such as
ISO 8859-1, Shift-JIS, EUC, Code Page 932, and Unicode. These encodings conflict
with one another - two encodings can use the same value for two different characters,
or use different values for the same character. After the creation of a file name, there
is no indication which code set was used. File names passed between systems using
different encodings may not display properly in the GUI.
Passing data between different platforms is not problematic if all platforms use the
same character set or if they use an implementation of Unicode (UTF-16 on Windows
and UTF-xx on other platforms), which accommodates all characters.
Unfortunately, the UTF-xx implementation of Unicode is not yet a standard on UNIX
systems. The components of the application can be distributed on several systems
and several platforms, like Windows XP Professional, Windows 2000, HP-UX, Solaris,
and AIX. Data on all these platforms has to be backed up and restored. Data Protector
cannot compensate for the lack of a common industry-wide representation of
languages and character sets, but minimizes the impact to the user.
Example
Under certain configurations in heterogeneous environments, the file names can
appear corrupted in the GUI. For example, when using Data Protector, it is possible
to back up files on HP-UX where the Disk Agent is running and to view those files
using the Data Protector GUI running on Windows. Unless identical code sets are
used on both platforms, file names may not display properly. This is because the
same character value can have a different meaning and appearance under a different
coded character sets.
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