On my laptop, I have Mandriva 2008. Locale is fr_CA.UTF-8.
I have to maintain/manage a server running Mandriva 2006 where the locale is fr_CA.ISO8859-1.
When I use ssh to communicate with the server, all accented characters in the server files are unrecognized and displayed with a question mark.
So, I need a way to set both machines on the same locale or to provide realtime translations between the two.

Questions
- how can I do it?
- on which machine?

Note: upgrading the whole server to UTF8 is not an acceptable solution. Downgrading the laptop to ISO-8859-1 permanently is not acceptable either.

Is the issue simply passing the LANG variable to the server? SSH is supposed to automatically do this by default but there is, or at least used to be, a bug if sshd is set up to use PAM for authentication. If that is the problem, one option would be to enter and export the LANG variable after logging in. You could automate that by having .bash_profile (or /etc/bash_profile) check if you are logging in via SSH, and optionally check for the host name you are logging in from.

Thanks BlackHole54
I will try it next time I go to that site.
But I still need more info:
- you said: "export the LANG variable". Should I set it to ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8?
- Mandriva also use the LANGUAGE environment variable. Would it be better than LANG?

I would think you would want to set it to fr_CA.UTF-8 to match your laptop. I am no expert here ..

Sorry, I don't know anything about the LANGUAGE variable. TMK, LANG is what you want. But I have never used Mandriva.

Hi,

Make sure that /etc/ssh/ssh_config in the client includes the line
SendEnv LANG LC_*

and that /etc/ssh/sshd_config in the server includes the line
AcceptEnv LANG LC_*

This sorted out the obnoxious issue of the question marks for me.

My ssh version (just in case):
OpenSSH_5.1p1 Debian-3, OpenSSL 0.9.8g 19 Oct 2007

Enjoy.