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KB-1966: UTF-8 character in password or hostname fails

Centrify DirectControl ,  

12 April,16 at 11:45 AM

Applies to:
 
All versions of Centrify DirectControl
 
Question:
 
Does Centrify support the usage of UTF-8 characters in AD passwords or hostnames?
 
Answer:
 
UTF-8 (UCS Transformation Format — 8-bit) is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode.UTF-8 is also increasingly being used as the default character encoding in operating systems, programming languages, APIs, and software applications.
 
 
1) Currently we do not support the usage of UTF-8 characters in hostnames.
 
You will see the following message when you attempt to join a Centrify server with UTF-8 character in the hostname to AD.
 
In the below example, the name of the server is Ól27 where Ó is the UTF-8 character.
 
[root@Ól27 ~]# adjoin -u administrator@yourcompany.com yourcompany.com 
 
Error: computer name must start with a letter or underscore, follow by a number, letter, _ or - 
 
Development efforts are underway for supporting this capability in future releases.
 
 
2) We have done preliminary testing of UTF-8 in passwords in our lab and it has worked fine. Full support will be provided in future releases.

Cause : The Kerberos 1.4.3 libraries that manage hashing of passwords are incompatible with UTF-8 characters. We will migrate code from the Kerberos 1.9 libraries to enable this support.
 
Note: For the above to work, the terminal should support UTF-8. Gnome-based or other console based logins will not work.
 
For example: An Euro or UTF-8 char can be created by holding down the ALT key and enabling the num lockpad on the PC and typing 0211 will give you the UTF-8 character Ó and so on. This must be entering in the password field of the Centrify/AD account.
 
On a Putty terminal (to a unix box), you should change the setting under Windows -> Translation -> Received data assumed to be in which character set: choose "UTF-8" in the pull down. Attempt login.
   
For more information of UTF-8, please refer to the Wiki page link provided below as a courtesy.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8
     

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