Re: Non-ASCII user names on Windows; internationalization fun

[David Fifield <david () bamsoftware com>]

On Sun, Sep 14, 2008 at 03:06:32PM +0100, jah wrote:
> On 14/09/2008 04:08, Fyodor wrote:
> > Hi Jah.  Did you do this testing with Nmap 4.76 or 4.75?
> Originally with 4.75, but I've now tried the same thing with 4.76
> (r10166)  and got the same result.  However,
>
> On 14/09/2008 03:55, David Fifield wrote:
> > I wonder if it would work if it was run on a Japanese or Chinese edition
> > of Windows. I get the impression that the encoding Windows uses for file
> > names depends on the locale. If that's the case it's not such a big
> > problem, as people with user names like that are more likely to use an
> > operating system specific to their language.
> I had this thought too, there must be other settings needed rather than
> just installing support for East Asian languages.  And with that, I find
> that changing "Language for non-Unicode programs" (Advanced tab of
> Intl.cpl) to match the language used for the user name seems to solve
> this problem entirely.

Hey, great stuff! I want to thank you again for helping out with this. I
tried it out myself and it worked. Here is a screenshot for the curious:
http://www.bamsoftware.com/wiki/uploads/Nmap/zenmap-jp.png. Notice the
interesting replacement of the yen symbol for the backslash. There's
more on that phenomenon at
http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2005/09/17/469941.aspx.

For the benefit of future web searchers, here is the error message
Zenmap displayed before I tried changing the locale under "Regional and
Language Options":

        Error creating the per-user configuration directory

        There was an error creating the directory C:\Documents and
        Settings\?????\.zenmap or one of the files in it. The directory
        is created by copying the contents of C:\Program
        Files\Nmap\zenmap\share\zenmap\config. The specific error was

        [Error 123] The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax
        is incorrect: u'C:\\Documents and Settings\\?????'

        Zenmap needs to create this directory to store information such
        as the list of scan profiles. Check for access to the directory
        and try again.

> I think you might be correct to say that this is not going to be a
> problem for users who have installed a Chinese/Japanese edition of
> windows.

I'll bet a lot of people use ASCII user names just because they know so
many programs will have trouble otherwise. I'm glad that Zenmap is now a
"good guy" in this regard.

David Fifield

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