Problem with danish letters ÆØÅ with apache NameVirtualHost
 

Hi,

I'm experiencing problems with the danish letters ÆØÅ in domain names. If I try to add a domain to my server, it fails.

Setup:
I'm running Debian 6.0 with apache version 2.2.16 and with the newest PHP and MySQL releases. To handle multiple domains I use the in-built apache funtion NameVirtualHost. Each domain has it's own file.

Adding 'domainæøå.dk' to it's own file its fairly simple:
/etc/apache2/sites-available/domainæøå.dk

Content:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName domainæøå.dk
DocumentRoot /var/www/domainæøå.dk/
</VirtualHost>

Issuing the command 'a2ensite domainæøå.dk' results in the following error:

ERROR: No site found matching domainæøå.dk!

Creating the symlink manually doesnt help either:
/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/domainæøå.dk -> /etc/apache2/sites-available/domainæøå.dk

Do you have any ideas what I should do? It works with domains containing only normal letters.

Regards
Morten

My initial guess would be that something in your locale configuration needs to be adjusted for the proper UTF character set. I was reading something about this recently in the Gentoo configuration documentation and it indicated a few things you needed to do to get applications to work properly with different character sets, though I don't recall the exact details.

Here is a link to their UTF-8 document, which gets into a lot of details about UTF support versus standard ASCII and it might shed some light on the subject. Just substitute your local character set for UTF-8. It also references the Locale guide which has more information, but is more geared towards how to pick the customization and use local currency symbols, etc.

Hi

I set up some sites like that some time ago, and I think I needed to use the ACE name in the Apache config. So you need to convert the name from IDN to ACE format. There are a lot of online converters that can do this, for example this:

http://www.netim.com/domain/tools/idn-converter.php

Thank you! The ACE name seemed to do the trick. Just had to adjust "ServerName" in apache virtual config. Simple and easy - if you know :)