msn "Unknown authentication type"

[TheGZeus <gzeusmants@…>]

(Originally reported in Debian's BTS, I'm moving this bug to bugs.b.o now. </wilmer>)

bitlbee fails to connect to MSN with the error 'Unknown authentication type' I was able to connect once by restarting bitlbee, but that has not worked since.

[wilmer]

Also reported by sjefen6 on #bitlbee.

At least in that case it seems to be caused by an invalid UTF-8 character in the friendly name that has 0x20 in it (ie. a space).

gzeus, do you have any non-ASCII characters in your MSN display name?

[gzeus <gzeusmants@…>]

I don't believe so, I think it was just my email address. It used to work, but on the most recent upgrade, poof. At Sun, 01 Nov 2009 15:23:55 -0000, BitlBee wrote:

[quote removed]

[avar]

I'm using bitlbee 1.2.3-2 and got the same error with the display_name "Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason". After I changed it to "avar" in Pidgin I could connect with bitlbee again.

I recently set the display name to the UTF8/0x20 name:

00:06 <@avar> account set 0/display_name "Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason"
00:06 <@root> display_name = `Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason'

After that I was able to reconnect several times. But after upgrading the bitlbee package in debian testing I ceased being able to do so.

[wilmer]

Hrmm. BitlBee hasn't changed it behaviour there any time recently (unless you were running 0.80 or something like that before, but that seems very unlikely). I'll do some experimenting with that name myself.

Æ was the source of the problem for the guy on IRC as well, at least.

[gzeus <gzeusmants@…>]

I did indeed have japanese in my nick. I'd been using bitlbee for so long that I'd forgotten. Odd regression, though. At Sun, 01 Nov 2009 15:23:55 -0000, BitlBee wrote:

[quote removed]

[Wilmer van der Gaast <wilmer@…>]

gzeus wrote:

I did indeed have japanese in my nick. I'd been using bitlbee for so long that I'd forgotten.
Odd regression, though.

A-ha! So this is what I saw with the guy in #bitlbee too. He had a
character in his name that got corrupted by the MSN server (at least at
this point I'm pretty sure this is a bug/"feature" in there), converting
one of the characters into a space.

Having a space character in the middle of the name confused BitlBee
badly and made it barf completely when it finishes logging in (the last
step of loggin in includes the server telling the client what his/her
display name is).

The work-around is simple, just make BitlBee less strict. But getting
the right information would still be nice, I'm not sure how to do that.