Werk #19259: arcserve_backup, windows_tasks: Fix German strings on Windows PowerShell
| Component | Checks & agents | ||||
| Title | arcserve_backup, windows_tasks: Fix German strings on Windows PowerShell | ||||
| Date | Sep 30, 2026 | ||||
| Level | Trivial Change | ||||
| Class | Bug Fix | ||||
| Compatibility | Compatible - no manual interaction needed | ||||
| Checkmk versions & editions |
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Previously, the Windows agent plugins arcserve_backup.ps1 and windows_tasks.ps1 did not work correctly with German strings. The Windows agent runs plugins with Windows PowerShell 5.1, which reads a script without a byte order mark in the system's ANSI code page, not as UTF-8. The German umlauts in both plugins were therefore garbled at runtime:
arcserve_backup.ps1searches the ARCserve log for "Ausführung von Job Sichern". This search never matched, so the plugin never found a backup job.windows_tasks.ps1always reported an empty next run time on German Windows systems, because it could not find the column "Nächste Laufzeit".
This has been fixed. Both strings are now written as character escapes, and all Windows agent plugins contain only ASCII characters.
After updating the plugins, you may notice:
- Arcserve Backup services now receive data, so their states may change.
- Task services on German Windows systems now show the next run time in their summary.
If you run the plugins with PowerShell 7 (pwsh), nothing changes for you. It reads the scripts as UTF-8, so the strings already worked.
Why now
We are moving the Authenticode signing of the Windows agent plugins from Windows to Linux. The signature of a PowerShell script covers its decoded text. If a script without a byte order mark contains non-ASCII characters, Windows reports the signature as HashMismatch on any host that decodes the file differently from the signing machine. With ASCII-only scripts, the plugin signatures are valid on every Windows host, whatever its code page.