[TYPO3-Solr] Non ASCII characters/ facets

[Marc Berlinghof]

Hi,
I spent a few days on setting up solr and connecting it to TYPO3 and I'm really impressed. Thank you for the extension!
But there still two issues...

The first one is about non ASCII characters. The Server is set to UTF-8 (at least the admin/get-properties.jsp says sun.jnu.encoding = UTF-8) but German Umlauts aren't handled correctly. Example: search for "Küste" returns 0 results, search for "Kuste" returns 1 result ("Küste"). How can I fix this?

The second one is about facets. How can I turn them on? I  copied the example into my setup but nothing happens (I have different content types).

plugin.tx_solr.search.faceting.facets {
 	type {
   		field = type 
   		label = Content Type 
   		sortBy = index 
   		keepAllOptionsOnSelection = 1 
   		operator = OR
   	}
}

And one more thing: The wikis says that indexing will work without <!-- TYPO3SEARCH_begin --> and <!-- TYPO3SEARCH_end -->. But for me it's not! 
Thank you,
Marc