[users@httpd] Can Apache be installed to a non-ASCII path on Windows 2008 R2?

[Darwin Kinghorn <Da...@symantec.com>]

I am attempting to install Apache to a location on a Windows 2008 R2 virtual machine that includes a non-ASCII directory name in the installation path, such as "C:\Program Files\ÄßüÖÄßüÖÄßüÖÄßüÖ".  At first the installation itself failed, because the custom installation process wrote the value of the Installation root to the "ServerRoot" variable in httpd.conf, and the installation failed when Apache read the non-ASCII path from its config file.  I was able to get past this error by writing the short (i.e., 8.3 format) directory name of the non-ASCII folder as the value of the ServerRoot variable, and the installation now completes successfully.

However, when the script to start Apache runs, Apache starts up but then immediately exits.  The command line used in the script is:

httpd.exe -k start -n <Instance name>

Apache starts up fine when the installation path is an all-ASCII path.  It exits only when the install path contains non-ASCII characters.

The Apache error logs are not helpful.

The problem seems to occur when the certificate-related variables in the httpd.conf file are loaded, and the sub-paths to the *.cert files are appended by Apache to its install directory.  If I install the "certs" folder to a separate location outside the non-ASCII directory, then Apache starts and runs fine even when installed under the non-ASCII location, as long as I put the fully qualified path to the certificate paths in the main config file, and those paths do not contain non-ASCII character.  This approach, however, would not seem to me to be supportable.

So my question is, is Apache configurable in some way to support an installation under a non-ASCII directory?

Thanks,
Darwin Kinghorn