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FusionReactor updated today: some general info related to getting/applying FR updates

Note: This blog post is from 2015. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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.
How to update FusionReactorFusionReactor users will want to know that there was a new update released today, 5.2.6. The update is free for those on 5.2.x releases as well as those with maintenance agreements. And you can just download the installer and run it to update your current version (even back to FR 5.0, if you've not updated FR 5 since you first installed it).

But more than that basic info, I'd like in this post to take advantage of the chance to share a few things related to the topic of upgrading FusionReactor, including some common questions I often am asked as I assist people in using it:

  • Where do I get the update?
  • How do I find out what's new in the update?
  • Should I hesitate about applying the very latest FR update as soon as it comes out?
  • How would you I know there WAS an update to FR available?
  • Do I just need to run the full installer or can I update just one file perhaps?
  • Do I need to restart CF (or Railo/Lucee/Tomcat, etc.) for the update to take effect?
  • Can I update FRAM and choose NOT to update my monitored CF/Railo/Lucee/Tomcat/etc instance?
  • Why do you keep referring to "CF/Railo/Lucee/Tomcat/etc"? I thought FR was a CF monitor tool?
  • What if I'm on an FR version older than 5.0?

For these and more, read on.

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CF911: Help, How do I connect sites to a new instance w/ the ColdFusion 10/11 webserver config tool?

Note: This blog post is from 2015. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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.
This one causes a lot of heartburn for folks: you add a new instance in CF10 or 11 (in editions other than Standard, which do support adding instances), and you find that you can't seem to have the web server configuration tool (wsconfig) connect sites to that new instance(s). You never see the new instance listed in the UI of the wsconfig tool. What gives?

The solution is relatively easy, and the problem could maybe be fixed (or at least warned about) by Adobe (and I just filed a bug report for it). Until that happens, I wanted to share this. For more, read on.

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Updates, updates. Get your CF updates! The CF Team has been busy fixin' bugs!

Note: This blog post is from 2015. 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'd not noticed, the CF team has been busy fixin' bugs! Over 300 in CF11 in just the past month. Check out these two announcements today of prereleases of update 5 for CF11 and update 16 for CF10:

This is on top of the release earlier this week of the final version of CF11 Update 4 (which had been in prerelease for a couple of weeks):

Great to see the CF team cranking on the bug fixes. I count just under 120 in the technotes for CF11 update 5, and just under 40 in CF10 update 16. And there were just under 200 fixes in Update 3 of CF11, which again was released just in recent weeks.

Yeah, but what about all those bugs?

Yes, I know some could twist things and say "yeah, but the problem is that there are so many bugs to be fixed". Sure.

Still, for others who may have longed to see their bugs fixed,

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Solving slow CF startup: my elaborating on an Adobe blog entry on a possible solution

Note: This blog post is from 2015. 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 fine folks at the Adobe CF blog posted a blog entry today, on "Sometimes ColdFusion services refuse to start normally post server restart" (by Rahul Upadhyay), which offers some helpful information on one possible solution to the stated problem of slow CF startup.

That said, there are some concerns I have, with respect to how I fear some may read and take action based on it (especially the notion of deleting the cfclasses files, as a possible solution to the problem).

I'm not contradicting Rahul here, just elaborating on some points, as someone who (like some on the CF team) helps people with CF server troubleshooting every day.

I started to write these thoughts as a comment there, and (as often happens) it grew long so I thought it better to be a blog entry rather than a long comment, and point people here. Once I did that I decided to go further still, hoping to really help those interested to consider the issue more carefully. (It also gives me a chance to highlight again the Adobe CF team blog, something I recommend EVERYONE reading this should follow!)

One quick point (and update) for the TL;DR crowd: My recommendation is that you move the cfclasses folder out of that location, as a temporary test, to see if it makes CF startup happen faster. If it does, I explain why and what the implications are in the choices of renaming, deleting, moving, or disabling the related "save class files" feature. Also, I add an update in E.1 below (since posting this) which you may really want to read: consider turning off your anti-virus software's real-time protection against the cfclasses folder to see if that alone helps with startup.

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CF911: 'Help! I've updated the JVM which ColdFusion uses, and now it won't start!'

Note: This blog post is from 2014. 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.
[Originally posted in Dec 2014, updated as recently as Apr 2021]

Has this happened to you? You wanted to update the JVM which CF uses to use a new version...

  • so you found some resource on the web showing how to update, and it seemed simple enough
  • and then you tried restarting CF and wham, it won't start, or the admin won't open, or code starts failing
  • and maybe it's that things didn't fail immediately, but within hours or days folks report things breaking since you made the change
  • and now you're stuck wondering, "what happened? and how am I supposed to fix this?"

It's a tough position to be in, and tragic of course if CF won't start. But no, you do NOT need to reinstall CF!

Often it's just one thing you did by mistake, though there are indeed several possible reasons why your attempt to update CF's JVM can fail or lead to unexpected problems. And as you google about, you may find all kinds of helpful but often misinformed or spartan suggestions that may or may not help much.

So I offer here over a dozen of things you can and should consider/look at, some of which you may quickly recover from or be able to undo (depends on what you did). And all this applies to Lucee, Railo, and BlueDragon as well, though folder locations will differ.

If you're facing this bind right now, you can skip over the following to the the section, "Seeing better error info, when the CF service won't start", and then the section after that "So what went wrong?", where I present each likely problem and solution.

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Hidden Gem: Importing CF Admin settings in ANY release via 'import wizard', even AFTER installation

Note: This blog post is from 2014. 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.
Have you ever faced the challenge of needing to migrate the CF Admin settings (datasources, mappings, scheduled tasks, etc.) from one machine to another, and from one CF version to a newer one? Did you know that there is an "import wizard" that you can (with proper configuration) run at any time to import settings from one release to another?

Before I discuss that, you may know of a couple of other solutions for this challenge: the CF admin ColdFusion Archive/CAR mechanism, available in some but not all editions (more below), and this same "import wizard" which runs at the end of CF installation, importing settings from an older CF version if found on the same box.

But what if either of those solutions don't work for you, and you have dozens of dsn's, scheduled tasks, mappings, or other settings you want to get from one machine/version to another?

You are NOT stuck having to manually copy settings from one screen to another! (And you should be very careful about the common hack solution of copying neo*.xml files from one instance to another, which may not always work and may break things.)

In this entry I'll discuss how you CAN indeed import the CF admin settings from nearly ANY release of CF into nearly ANY OTHER release of CF, in a fully supported way, and which CAN be done even after installation of a new CF release. (I say "nearly", because I worked with someone wanting to do this import of CF7 settings into CF10, and that large a jump was was not supported.)

I'll also mention an important potential gotcha to beware, as well as how to to get around that.

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Find ColdFusion installers, updates, hotfixes, and docs for all recent releases at CFMLRepo.com

Note: This blog post is from 2014. 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.
This won't be new info for some, but many folks remain confused by the fact, that after Adobe release their current latest ColdFusion version, they no longer offer the previous versions(s) on their public-facing Adobe site. (Those who license CF are given access to a licensing site with a personal account there, where they can download the installers for versions they bought even years after they are no longer supported.)

What if you either don't have such an account or only use CF for Development or trial purposes? How do you find older previous installers?

Find CF installers, updates, and docs for past several releases

The good news is that if one wants to find ANY installers for most ANY version of CF, they can be found on an external repository setup years ago by Gavin Pickin (and still maintained by him and others, including myself, at:

CFML Repo

The site even has installers all the way back to CF1.5, as well as updates, docs, CFBuilder installers, and more.

The name, CFMLRepo, may confuse some if they presume it's a repo of CFML. It's not. IT's that it has both CF and Lucee installers, thus the more "generic" name.

(And there used to be a longer and hard-to-remember URL for the site, when I had posted this originally in 2014, and I had created a shortened url, http://bit.ly/cfdownloads. It's now definitely not "shorter", but I leave this here for posterity.)

Thanks so much to Gavin for creating the repo, and to him and others for maintaining it. Let's hope it remains a viable solution to find downloads for years to come.

New updates for Coldfusion 11, 10, and 9 (security update for 9, 11; still more for 10)

Note: This blog post is from 2014. 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'd not heard the news, there were several updates released today, for CF 11, 10, and 9.

As for CF11 and CF9, it's mainly a security update. For CF10, it's got quite a bit more. (And there is another update for CF11 to come in the future which Adobe mentioned when it came out with its first update last month.)

For more on each, see below.

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CF911: Solving problem in ColdFusion Admin getting "error accessing this page" on certain actions

Note: This blog post is from 2014. 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.
Here's a real CF911 challenge (and solution): You may find that when using the CF Admin, especially in CF10 but it can happen in CF 9 or 8 depending on security hotfixes applied, when performing certain Admin operations (like making a change, or verifying datasources, or checking for server updates) you get an error:

"There was an error accessing this page. Check logs for more details."

And your operation fails. You're then prompted to "Click here to login", but even if you back up or client another link, you'll be prompted with the CF Admin login.

What gives? Why is it happening? And how can you fix things? Is CF broken? No, not in the sense that you need to reinstall or anything. The good news is that there is a quite simple solution. Well, there are several, depending on your goals.

The simple solution: delete the duplicate cfid/cftoken or jsessionid cookies that you will find your browser is sending to CF. But there is much more to this, as well as other solutions, which would be worth most readers taking a few minutes to read on here.

BTW, the same root problem can be the cause of your own application's users finding that they can't stay logged in. More on that in a moment.

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Applying hotfixes to ColdFusion 9 and earlier? A guide to getting it right

Note: This blog post is from 2014. 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 realize that title may seem anachronistic. Why talk about hotfixes in CF9 and earlier, in 2014, indeed as CF11/Splendor is in beta? But I'll tell you that I still help people daily who are still on those older releases, and often they have problems that may have long since been solved by a hotfix or a cumulative hotfix they never applied--or may be caused by misapplication of such hotfixes.

Of course, in CF10 it's easier now because of the built-in "server updates" feature of the CF Admin. But in earlier releases, it was all on you to both keep up on the updates and to apply them manually. And a lot of people either never bothered, or may have tried and failed, or did it but got it wrong.

What you need to know

So in this blog entry, I some key info that will help you, if you may be in need of applying one or more of those updates to CF9 and earlier. Indeed, I'll point to some past entries I've done where I shared a lot more detail that I find is vital and rarely mentioned when some people try to share just the bare minimum of info (often leaving people hanging).

For instance, I'll help you answer such questions as what hotfixes do you already have applied? How do you find out? And you need to know exactly what version of CF you have, whether 9.0/9.0.1/9.0.2, 8.0/8.0.1, 7.0/7.0.1/7.0.2, and so on. I'll explain how to tell and why that's important, and especially when it comes to finding and applying hotfixes. And if you have applied hotfixes, are you sure you have done it right? It's easy to get things wrong and botch things. I'll help you avoid several very common mistakes.

(That's why it's so great that CF10 finally handles things for us. But this entry, focused on 9 and earlier, is not the place to discuss concerns with the CF10 hotfix mechanism. If you have questions or concerns about that, see the substantial CF10 Hotfix Installation Guide from Adobe, a 50-question FAQ on all things related to that feature.)

I'll also point you to where to find hotfixes and installers for CF9 and earlier (not as easy as it may seem), and still more.

If any of that's of interest, and I hope it is if you're on CF9 or earlier, then read on.

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