Plesk installation fails: UnicodeEncodeError: ‘ascii’ codec can’t encode character u’xdc’ in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

Symptoms

• Installation fails with:

  UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'xdc' in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)
   Execute command /usr/local/psa/admin/bin/send-error-report install --version 17.8.11
  Warning: Failed to attach to cgroup /sys/fs/cgroup/systemd/user/root/tasks, installer might be unexpectedly killed later by the system
  Error: Failed to run the Yum utility.
   The Yum utility failed to install the required packages.
   Attention! Your software might be inoperable.
   Please contact product technical support.

• Server is running on CentOs with German locale:

  # locale
  LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
  LC_CTYPE=”de_DE.UTF-8″
  LC_NUMERIC=”de_DE.UTF-8″
  LC_TIME=”de_DE.UTF-8″
  LC_COLLATE=”de_DE.UTF-8″
  LC_MONETARY=”de_DE.UTF-8″
  LC_MESSAGES=”de_DE.UTF-8″
  LC_PAPER=”de_DE.UTF-8″
  LC_NAME=”de_DE.UTF-8″
  LC_ADDRESS=”de_DE.UTF-8″
  LC_TELEPHONE=”de_DE.UTF-8″
  LC_MEASUREMENT=”de_DE.UTF-8″
  LC_IDENTIFICATION=”de_DE.UTF-8″
  LC_ALL=

• LANGUAGE variable is not empty:

  # echo $LANGUAGE
  de_DE.UTF-8

Cause

Incorrect value for $LANGUAGE which causes yum-python to decode UTF symbols with ASCII code.
It is considered as a bug in the product with ID #PPPM-10782 which is planned to be fixed in future Plesk updates.

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Resolution

As a workaround:

1. Connect to the server via SSH

2. Run the installer with an empty LANGUAGE variable:

   # env LANGUAGE= ./plesk-installer