Support for Unicode and non-Unicode characters

The probe can process multibyte characters and so can display both Unicode and non-Unicode characters.

Note: If you do not configure the probe to process multi-byte characters, it discards any traps it receives that contain such characters.

Unicode characters

Use the following procedure to set up the probe to process characters in Unicode UTF-8 format:

  1. Ensure that the SNMP endpoint is configured to send traps in UTF-8 format.
  2. Set the required locale on the system that runs the probe:
    Table 1. Setting the locale for Unicode UTF-8 characters
    Operating system Procedure to set the locale

    Linux and Unix

    Set the locale by changing the values of the LANG and LC_ALL environment variables. For example, to set the locale to simplified Chinese, use the following commands:

    export LANG=zh_CN.UTF-8
export LC_ALL=zh_CN.UTF-8

    Windows
    1. Open the Control Panel and double click on Regional and Language.
    2. On the Formats tab, select the language from the list in Format.
    3. On the Administrative tab, click Change system locale.
    4. Select the language from the list in Current System Locale.
    5. Click OK.
    6. Click OK.
  3. Configure the ObjectServer to enable the insertion of data that uses UTF-8 format. The IBM Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus Installation and Deployment Guide shows how to create, configure, and run an ObjectServer in UTF-8 mode.
  4. Start or, if it is already running, restart the probe.

    When running the probe on a Windows system, always specify the -utf8enabled command line option.

Other multi-byte character sets

In addition to characters encoded in Unicode UTF-8 format, the probe can process other multi-byte character sets such as GB, Big5 or Shift-JIS. Use the following procedure to process characters in such character sets:

  1. Ensure that the SNMP endpoint is configured to send traps in the required format.
  2. Set the locale on system that runs the probe:
    Table 2. Setting the locale for other multi-byte character sets
    Operating system Procedure to set the locale

    Linux and Unix

    Set the locale by setting the LANG environment variable to C environment variables. For example:

    export LANG=C

    Windows

    Follow the instructions in Table 1
  3. Configure the ObjectServer to process the required character set. The IBM Tivoli Netcool/OMNIbus Installation and Deployment Guide shows how to create, configure, and run an ObjectServer.
  4. Start or, if it is already running, restart the probe.

    When running the probe on a Windows system, do not use the -utf8enabled command line option.