On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 10:49 PM, km <km AT grogg DOT org> wrote:
> I would advice against overriding the default settings in a script and
> instead to set the correct locale for the system. Most system settings in
> RHEL based distros are made in the sysconfig directory:
>
> http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/5.1/Deployment_Guide/s2-sysconfig-i18n.html
>

Please let me disagree with you. I think it's a wrong approach to
change locale for the entire OS for the sake of backups only.
Besides, I'm not fully aware of consequences of changing the locale
system wide.
Are you?

> In this case, if the locale does not exist, just install it. Since the en_US
> locale is included in the glibc-common RPM try to reinstall or update that
> RPM.

I didn't tell en_US locale doesn't exist. In contrary, it does. What I
said is that Linux TSM client will not backup files with funny
characters in filename after dsmcad is started from init script on
_bootup_ with LC_CTYPE and LANG locales set to en_US in RHEL and SLES.

I challenge anyone to show that it works for him/her in any version of
RHEL or SLES.

>> However, a user running CentOS thinks that en_US does not exist in that 
>> flavor of LINUX, so he misses 1000s of files each night.
>>
>> Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Fred has touched here a major problem that has plagued TSM product
line for ages and continues to go unresolved. This is absolutely
unacceptable that TSM client skips files with filenames that do not
conform to specific locale. In my view, every file that can be
registered in a file system (ext3/reiser/xfs) supported by major
commercial Linux distributions (RHEL/SLES) must be backed up no matter
what.  As long as file system itself is consistent and underlying
physical media is not damaged everything should just work.
At around 2008 IBM published a paper called "Tivoli Storage Manager
and Localization". The paper contains explanations on why it doesn't
work and describes in length how to deal with the files named in
various barbarian languages. It's a fascinating reading, but doesn't
help much in my situation. And besides, with all due respect, IMO
that's not something I, as administrator, should be dealing with. If
GNU tar can swallow and restore these files without messing with
locale or anything else, why TSM cannot?
--
Warm regards,
Michael Green