Proxying internationalised URLs in EZproxy config.txt (proposed new warning)

In New Zealand have an official language (te reo Te Reo Māori) which includes non-ASCII characters. Our national TLD .nz has allowed these characters to appear in domain names for almost ten years. I recently tried to add one of these to EZproxy and it didn't work. Unfortunately it's non-workingness was silent: EZproxy silently truncated the line at the 'bad' character but still entered the truncated hostname into it's database. The real fix for this is to use punycode to escape the non-ASCII characters, but it's hard to know that this is the fix unless (a) you know things are broken and (b) that punycode exists.

I would like to to suggest a new error message to handle this situation:

"2019-11-29 10:54:32 Truncated at 'viewer.wair' due to non-ASCII character. If this is an internationalized domain name, use punycode."

Below is the example I had.

cheers
stuart

Old config.txt:

Title VUW Library Rosetta viewer (Special order-dependent stanza)
URL http://vuwunicolibevp1.ods.vuw.ac.nz
HJ https://vuwunicolibevp1.ods.vuw.ac.nz
HJ http://viewer.waireto.victoria.ac.nz
HJ https://viewer.waireto.victoria.ac.nz
HJ http://viewer.wairētō.victoria.ac.nz
HJ https://viewer.wairētō.victoria.ac.nz

What appeared in /status :

HJ viewer.wair:443
HJ viewer.wair:80
HJ viewer.waireto.victoria.ac.nz:443
HJ viewer.waireto.victoria.ac.nz:80
HJ vuwunicolibevp1.ods.vuw.ac.nz:443
H vuwunicolibevp1.ods.vuw.ac.nz:80

Fixed config.txt:

Title VUW Library Rosetta viewer (Special order-dependent stanza)
URL http://vuwunicolibevp1.ods.vuw.ac.nz
HJ https://vuwunicolibevp1.ods.vuw.ac.nz
HJ http://viewer.waireto.victoria.ac.nz
HJ https://viewer.waireto.victoria.ac.nz
HJ http://viewer.xn--wairt-lza12b.victoria.ac.nz
HJ https://viewer.xn--wairt-lza12b.victoria.ac.nz

What appears in /status:

HJ viewer.xn--wairt-lza12b.victoria.ac.nz:443
HJ viewer.xn--wairt-lza12b.victoria.ac.nz:80
HJ viewer.waireto.victoria.ac.nz:443
HJ viewer.waireto.victoria.ac.nz:80
HJ vuwunicolibevp1.ods.vuw.ac.nz:443
H vuwunicolibevp1.ods.vuw.ac.nz:80

Ngā mihi
stuart

--
Stuart Yeates
Library Technology Specialist
Victoria University of Wellington
[email protected]




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