What does it mean if I'm getting a "Conversion error: Illegal multibyte sequence" when trying to access a Samba share?

Question

I just setup a new Samba share one one Linux machine and was trying to connect from another Linux machine.

I kept getting an error which traced to a samba/smbd entry in /var/log/syslogon the server that looked like this:

Feb  5 09:57:58 bullet smbd[18774]: [2020/02/05 09:57:58.902870,  0] ../lib/util/charset/convert_string.c:438(convert_string_talloc_handle)
Feb  5 09:57:58 bullet smbd[18774]:   Conversion error: Illegal multibyte sequence(<ED>)

What might be causing this?

Answer 1

I had similar problem. It turned out that the Full Name had special characters that was ok for 10 or so years but not ok since latest upgrade.

What I did:

1. changed user Full Name in /etc/passwd
2. removed user smbpasswd -x
3. re-added user: smbpasswd -a

Hope it helps someone with similar issue.

The log looked like this: /etc/samba/log.

[2023/12/25 08:01:43.009249, 3, pid=5439, effective(0, 0), real(0, 0)] ../../lib/util/charset/convert_string.c:318(convert_string_handle) convert_string_handle: convert_string_internal: Conversion error: Illegal multibyte sequence [2023/12/25 08:01:43.009362, 1, pid=5439, effective(0, 0), real(0, 0), class=rpc_parse] ../../librpc/ndr/ndr.c:668(_ndr_push_error) ndr_push_charset: ndr_push_error(Character Conversion Error): Bad character conversion at ../../librpc/ndr/ndr_string.c:771 [2023/12/25 08:01:43.009446, 1, pid=5439, effective(0, 0), real(0, 0)] ../../source3/smbd/smbXsrv_session.c:957(smbXsrv_session_global_store) smbXsrv_session_global_store: key '2E949209' ndr_push - NT_STATUS_INVALID_PARAMETER

Answer 2

So it turns out that several of the directories in the parent directory I was trying to share had names with ascii characters outside of the standard range. For example, there were a couple directories with accented characters in the name.

Renaming these directories fixed the issue.