Locale in non-English exploit shell

[hdm at metasploit.com (H D Moore)]

Great feedback -- to be able to code this properly, we need a way to 
detect the remote code page. One trouble we have with using the Iconv 
calls is that they can crash/break when invalid unicode characters are 
present in the stream. This is the reason why MSFGUI is so poor at 
handling non-english locales. 

The easiest way to implement this would be a new advanced option for all 
payloads with an interactive shell. Can we assume the metasploit-side 
code page is always going to be UTF-8? I should have Russian language 
versions of XP/2003 to test, but it may take a while to get this running.

Thanks!

-HD

On Wednesday 12 November 2008, Vladimir Yakovlev wrote:
> When you explit non-English Windows, some text appear in wrong charset.
> On russain Windows cmd.exe runs in cp866, meterpeter in cp1251. My
> Linux box run on UTF-8. So i needed recode cp866->UTF-8 in bindshell,
> and cp1251->UTF-8 in meterpeter. To cd/download/... non-english dirs
> all commands must be transcoded back. So whai is my patch. Charsets are
> hardcoded. Good idea is place charsets in config, or autodetect from
> windows version. svn diff