User unable to login to SVN (With Crowd Apache Connector) when his/her password contains the £ sign

Platform Notice: Data Center Only - This article only applies to Atlassian products on the Data Center platform.

Note that this KB was created for the Data Center version of the product. Data Center KBs for non-Data-Center-specific features may also work for Server versions of the product, however they have not been tested. Support for Server* products ended on February 15th 2024. If you are running a Server product, you can visit the Atlassian Server end of support announcement to review your migration options.

*Except Fisheye and Crucible

Symptoms

  1. Login attempts to Atlassian Apps and Apache static HTML pages works fine

  2. Changing the password to another password without the £ sign resolves the issue temporarily

Cause

This is discussed here: http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ds/viewMessage.do?dsForumId=757&dsMessageId=2669329 . Apparently TortoiseSVN encodes the password in UTF-8 before the password is sent to the server. Hence, the £ sign is encoded before being sent, causing an invalid password failure

Workaround

As per the Symptoms above, changing the password to a password that does not contain the £ sign will resolve the issue. This is a workaround, and not a real resolution. Real resolution needs to come from a proper fix to this: http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ds/viewMessage.do?dsForumId=757&dsMessageId=2669329 (do not encode the password to UTF-8 before passing it to Apache)

Updated on April 15, 2025

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