KB-1094 "Unsupported encoding: XXXXX" error thrown when starting the application server

Symptoms

When starting the application server, the following is printed towards the beginning of application server log:

Tomcat

WARNING [main] org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina.load Catalina.start using conf/server.xml: 
java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException: UTF-XX

JBoss

Caused by: com.ctc.wstx.exc.WstxIOException: Unsupported encoding: XXXXX

The application server then fails to deploy.

Cause

This "Caused by" message is printed out when one of the application server configuration files has been modified to an unsupported encoding mechanism. By default, encoding is set to UTF-8.

Tomcat

The opening line encoding ="UTF-8" of the server.xml file was changed. This file is located in <APPIAN_HOME>/tomcat/apace-tomcat/conf directory.

JBoss

The two following examples are results of using faulty configuration files:

standalone.xml

ERROR [org.jboss.as.server] (Controller Boot Thread) JBAS015956: Caught exception during boot: org.jboss.as.controller.persistence.ConfigurationPersistenceException: JBAS014676: Failed to parse configuration
...
Caused by: com.ctc.wstx.exc.WstxIOException: Unsupported encoding: XXXXX

appian-ds.xml

ERROR [org.jboss.msc.service.fail] (MSC service thread 1-1) MSC000001: Failed to start service jboss.deployment.unit."appian-ds.xml".PARSE: org.jboss.msc.service.StartException in service jboss.deployment.unit."appian-ds.xml".PARSE: JBAS018733: Failed to process phase PARSE of deployment "appian-mysql-ds.xml"
...
Caused by: org.jboss.as.server.deployment.DeploymentUnitProcessingException: Unsupported encoding: XXXXX
...
Caused by: com.ctc.wstx.exc.WstxIOException: Unsupported encoding: XXXXX

In both examples above, the opening line encoding="UTF-8"? of the configuration files was changed. For reference, standalone.xml can be found under <JBOSS_HOME>/standalone/configuration and appian-ds.xml under <JBOSS_HOME>/standalone/deployments.

Action

Locate the problematic configuration file and change the encoding to UTF-8.

Affected Versions

This article applies to all versions of Appian.