How to fix locale settings in Debian squeeze

I occasionally get locale errors and I've tried to run dpkg-reconfigure locales to fix the problem. Here's the output:

:~$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
    LANGUAGE = (unset),
    LC_ALL = (unset),
    LC_CTYPE = "UTF-8",
    LANG = "en_US.UTF-8"
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
/usr/bin/locale: Cannot set LC_CTYPE to default locale: No such file or directory
/usr/bin/locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
Generating locales (this might take a while)...
  en_US.UTF-8... done
Generation complete.
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
    LANGUAGE = (unset),
    LC_ALL = (unset),
    LC_CTYPE = "UTF-8",
    LANG = "C"
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
    LANGUAGE = (unset),
    LC_ALL = (unset),
    LC_CTYPE = "UTF-8",
    LANG = "C"
    are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to the standard locale ("C").

I looked for /usr/bin/locale but it doesn't exist on my system. Do I need to create it? What do I put in there?

Also I found a related question that says the cause of his problem was in the sshd_config file. The file had the following entry:

AcceptEnv LANG LC_*

I'm mainly concerned that it may cause problems for my VPS, otherwise if it's nothing major I'll be happy to ignore the problem. What should I do? thanks!

first:

sudo apt-get purge locales

then:

sudo aptitude install locales

and the famous:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales

This rids the system of locales, then re-installs locales and downgrades libc6 from 2.19 to 2.13 which is the issue. Then configures locales again.

If this happens when SSHing to your box, but not on console, try reconfiguring your ssh client (on your local machine). On Mac OS X for example edit /private/etc/ssh_config and comment out

# SendEnv LANG LC_*

Thanks to the post of bredman on the Rasberry Pi Bulletin Board.

I had this problem for a long time and all the usual advice about dpkg-reconfigure locales, locale-gen, etc didn't help. So I played around a little bit with the environment variables, and what I found was that the system was borking on the LC_CTYPE environment variable! UTF-8 is not a valid value for it. Setting it to en_US.UTF-8 fixed it.

To make the change permanent, I ran

update-locale LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8

which writes to /etc/default/locale. And then reboot the system for it to take effect completely.