Note: This blog post is from 2012. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

By now most in the CF world (who are connected to community news, at least) should have heard that today is the last day Adobe will be offering a release of CF 9 including Verity, and CF8 at all. I offer here a little more news on that, but more important I offer how you can still find and get those downloads if you want them, even when no longer listed as links on the site. They're now no longer easy to find.

(And I have updated the entry as of Aug 3, 2012, and all below still applies, unless stricken out.)

First, as for what's changing, it's that Adobe has to "pull from the shelves" any releases of CF that include Verity. But while many have been asserting that CF9 was going away, that's not true. And even CF8 can be obtained formally under certain conditions.

But I also offer here some ways you may be able to get these files even if Adobe no longer offers links to them.

But let's tackle a few points of common misinformation this week.

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Note: This blog post is from 2012. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

The good news is that you just need to update the one hotfix jar. While it is discussed in the technote for the hotfix, the note about this update is sadly (currently) at the BOTTOM of the technote. I'll repeat what it says here, to give it some more visibility:

Note - Updated on March 29, 2012

Following bug is reported for ColdFusion 801 against this security bulletin hotfix.

java.lang.NoSuchMethodError Exception is thrown while using cffile upload.

We have updated the hotfix files of ColdFusion 801 to include the fix for the above issue. Users who have already applied the hotfix for ColdFusion 801 can just update the hotfix jar.

I'm pretty sure this is fixing what some found to be a reliance in the hotfix on your having applied one of the specific Cumulative hotfixes, but if someone had not, or if they inadvertently removed the CHF during the process of adding this single one, things would break. I'll note that the HF technote above does say very specifically what jars to remove, when applying the hotfix. Some people in haste instead delete all the hf and chf jars, or delete chf hars when it says to remove only hf jars. They so look similar in name.

I cover this issue of being careful about applying hotfixes (there are other mistakes you can easily make) in another blog entry I did, CF911: Are you finding CF (or CF Admin) busted after applying a hotfix? Three possible reasons.

And before someone chimes in to lament, "this is what's so wrong with the CF hotfix process, that mistakes can be easily made", I cover that too. The short answer is that Adobe is addressing this in CF10, and may even offer something to help us later for CF 8 and 9. We shall see.

Note: This blog post is from 2011. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

Update: Great news. It turns out that just days before I wrote this entry in late 2011, Adobe had in fact addressed and resolved this problem (quietly, I'd say) by making security fixes written from Dec 2011 (apsb11-29) on now have 2 sets of steps, one for if you HAD applied the security hotfix previous to it, and one for if you HAD NOT. And this has proven to be the case for the next few, as I write this update in late 2012. So we can now consider them effectively "cumulative", for those from Dec 2011, on. You need only focus on the latest, and follow either of its 2 provided sets of steps.

That said, I'm not 100% sure if all those from Dec 2011 include all ones prior to that. Has anyone tested things to know?

I'll leave the rest of the note below here for posterity, but stricken out.

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Note: This blog post is from 2011. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

Both CF 9.0 and 9.01 run on older JVMs (and therefore need this update). And are you on CF8? You're not left out: Adobe even has confirmed this update can be applied to CF 8 and 8.01, too!

Note: if you are finding this blog post because you're searching the web for help on updating the JVM that underlies ColdFusion, note that this is a very old post (2011) about one specific JVM version. Instead, for a more general discussion of updating the JVM, and especially about solving and preventing common problems when doing that, see my more "recent" (2014) and more elaborated post: CF911: 'Help! I've updated the JVM which ColdFusion uses, and now it won't start!'.

Still more updates since this originally was posted:

Update 1: Since I wrote this blog entry in Oct 2011, Adobe has since come out with a new technote in Oct 2012 saying that you are now permitted to update to any version of Java 1.6 (for CF 8/9/10).
Update 2: Since posting this note, I've realized I should document an important fact to be aware of if you DO update the JVM: after doing so, it may seem that changes you made to allow CFHTTP calls to SSL pages (or other tags in CFML that talk via SSL or TLS) may "seem to have been lost". The issue is likely that you had modified your current CF setup to import specific certificates for such sites, but those changes are "lost" when you change the JVM that CF is now using (which has its own keystore). But these cert changes can be recovered. For more on that, see the next to last section below.
Update 3: In Feb 2013, Adobe did come out with an update that authorizes moving to Java 1.7 in either 9 or 10. You must apply the update first, though. More in this Adobe blog entry.

Old news, but not everyone knows

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Note: This blog post is from 2011. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

The "good" news is that there are at least a few really common explanations of what may have happened, which I'll explain them here. Once you consider them, you may find either that you can confirm this is what happened (and fix it), or if nothing else you can keep it in mind if you're ever applying them yourself in the future.

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Note: This blog post is from 2011. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

In this second entry, I'll address the separate but related problem, particularly if you're running CF as a Windows service, that you may find you get timeout errors from the Windows Services panel itself. I'll share some tips to help with that, which I share often with clients of my independent consulting as a CF troubleshooter.

The first thing to understand is that there is indeed a timeout (configurable) for how long the Windows Services control panel is willing to wait. Beyond that, though, there are some 3 more tricks you can use to avoid that timeout. (And I would say again that sometimes you really want to focus instead on WHY CF is taking so long to startup or shutdown, but until you do, the following info may help give you some breathing room.)

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Note: This blog post is from 2011. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

First, this one will help you perhaps find why it's so slow. You may just have been looking in the wrong place for that diagnostic information. Second, the next entry will offer tips to handle on better handling the situation (that the Windows service is slow to stop, and timeouts in the Windows Services panel itself) which you may need to consider until you do solve the root cause problem (or in case it happens again for other reasons).

(Note that most of this info will apply as well if your problem is that CF's taking a long time to start, also.)

As some of you know, I do CF server troubleshooting as an independent consultant. In helping several people a week, this is a fairly common complaint. This also came up on a mailing list today, so I decided to offer these thoughts here.

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Note: This blog post is from 2011. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

If you're looking for how to configure CFBuilder to open htm files with the CFML editor, see that other entry. This one instead is about the related idea of having CF (the server) process htm (or other) file extensions. There are certainly pros and cons.

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Note: This blog post is from 2011. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

Update, Recording: Note that this session was recorded. You can view it here, but note that you must login with an Adobe ID to see it.

And I'm presenting a session tonight, Tuesday September 13, at 7pm Eastern, on "Understanding and Using the ColdFusion Server Monitor".

As many of you know, I'm pretty much a fanatic about the monitor, especially about truly understanding elements of it that many miss. And so in my talk this will not be just a dog and pony show, but I will talk about practical experiences with it, though presented to either those new to it or experienced with it.

Note that the times for all these devweek sessions is shown (on the Adobe site) as being Pacific time, so again mine is at 7pm, not 4pm, Eastern.

And yes, the sessions are being recorded and seem to be made available the next day.

Finally, beware that there is no one URL you can use to join in on all the Connect sessions, nor can you get the Connect session URL by going to the event page (via the first link above). Instead, you must register for each event (free) from that first page, to get each session's Connect URL--and you'll want to do that at least several minutes in advance of any session to have time to register, get the email, login, etc.

See you then.

PS Hey, while we're talking monitoring, note as well that if you've not heard, FusionReactor has come out with its new release 4, which has lots of great additions, especially FREC (or the FR Extensions for CF) which cause FR to grab and log lots of great info that the CF Server Monitor only shows and never logs. I'll be blogging about FR 4 soon, but plenty to see on their site. and FusionAnalytics is also just about to release, really!

I won't be discussing these at this talk, focused solely on the server monitor, but as I always tell folks, each tool has its use and often a single shop can benefit from having both (like I do, as do many of the clients I help with troubleshooting). You can find more from me about FR here in my blog. And I'll have lots more to say about FA and FR4 more soon.

Note: This blog post is from 2011. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

I'll detail the limits per version/edition below.

I'll also offer a (possibly surprising) workaround that can allow you to get even more requests through IIS, even for a single web site.

(Before I elaborate on that, note that there is a separate issue if you're finding that CF doesn't let you see more than 25 requests at once. That's instead due to a setting in CF/JRun, the maxworkerthreads setting. For more on that, see this blog entry.)

That said, this is a problem which could affect anyone regardless of the app server they may be running behind IIS. (And yes, I do realize that for some, the answer to this problem will be, "see, that's another reason to run Apache." We get that. Let's just focus on this problem for those who choose/have to remain on IIS.)

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