Checkmk Werk 15179: <tt>logwatch</tt> agent plugin: Always encode output in UTF-8

ID: 15179 Title: <tt>logwatch</tt> agent plugin: Always encode output in UTF-8 Component: Checks & agents Level: 1 Class: Bug fix Version: 2.2.0i1 This werk is only incompatible if you monitor logfiles containing non-ASCII characters with the <tt>logwatch</tt> agent plugin. As of this werk, the <tt>logwatch</tt> agent plugin always encodes its ouput in UTF-8. Before, the encoding depended on the system settings. This werk is marked as incompatible because it can have an unexpected side effect: On some systems, users might now have to explicitly configure the encoding of the monitored log files. The reason for this is that if not explicitly configured, the <tt>logwatch</tt> plugin tries to guess the encoding. If the wrong encoding is guessed, log files are decoded incorrectly, however, before this werk, this error might have cancelled out due to <tt>logwatch</tt> using the same encoding both for decoding logfiles and encoding its output. Since the latter is now always done using UTF-8, this cancellation will not happen anymore. If you are affected by this, you will either see the replacement character `�` appearing in your log messages or your log messages will contain random non-ASCII characters which do not make sense. As a positive side effect, correcting this issue enables the matching of patterns containing non- ASCII characters. Before, using the wrong encoding to decode the logfiles prevented this, effectively leading to overlooked messages.