CF 9.0.1 upgrade woes
When the ColdFusion 9.0.1 upgrade was released, I noticed a few blog and forum posts mentioning issues. I also noticed many people reporting no problems at all, so I decided to wait for a little while. It seems that the comments and talked died down over the last week so I decided to take the plunge today. The new feature of setting cfid, cftoken, and jsessionid as httponly is something I need so, that pushed me to take a chance.
On Friday I updated my development machine and the upgrade went smooth. I decided to update the production server today and crossed my fingers that it would upgrade cleanly as well. I stopped all ColdFusion, IIS, and Antivirus related services and started the install process. It would make it to a point where it mentioned it was moving the web-inf folder and would just hang. I finally had to kill the process and rebooted the server to give it another try. Same result as the first time, the installation would just hang indefinitely.
I no longer had a function ColdFusion instance at this point so I had to follow the 9.0.1 upgrade removal process outlined here. After following the instructions my site now seems to function properly except that I can no longer get into my ColdFusion Administrator. I originally ran into a Permission denied for creating Java object: coldfusion.server.SystemInfo error, but was able to fix it following these instructions. Now, I'm left with a 404 error when I try to go to the Administrator. The virtual directory properly points to the CFIDE directory and the ip restrictions allow for my location. I think that I will look into this more tomorrow as I have already spent much more time than I planned for on this today. Overall, I'm hoping someone out there might have some advice as to how I can get access to my administrator back, but also to hear people in the communities overall thoughts on this 9.0.1 upgrade.
Comments
Please don't take offensive, but a single "weekend" of one person testing the update seems a bit dangerous to me. Perhaps I come from a "big company" mentality, but before we consider launching a app server update we do a very deliberate amount of testing. Of course, we start with installing on our local development machines. But those machines are usually not the same configuration as the production machines. Plus those machines are usually accessed by a single developer. So, then we install one on a test server. This doesn't perfectly match the production machine in our case, but it comes as close as possible. We then allow many of our internal users to bang on it, including our QA employees to make sure nothing critical breaks. Obviously smaller companies would have to scale this approach. Wouldn't something like that save some heartburn?
@Kevin - I don't take offense to your comment at all and I understand your point. We just come from much different situations. I work for a small non profit and there is no we, it is just I. We have no surplus of testing machines, testing staff or QA employees. I wear the hat of developer, system admin, tester, support and everything else. I read others experiences with this upgrade, but needed one of the features, so I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best. I now know that was my mistake. I'm now getting further behind as I try to get my CF Admin back. Lesson learned. My only other thought is that Adobe should have followed your guidance as well. With so many people running into issues that have not removed the upgrade from their site or at least provided solutions to the numerous issues. I have to wonder how much testing and QA the upgrade went through at Adobe before being distributed to its loyal customers.
When I upgraded our servers, I deleted all the classes in the WEB-INF/cfclasses directory (do it using MS-DOS as Windows Explore can hang!) ColdFusion will recreate these files in this directory so don't worry about them, although you could rename the folder and create an empty cfclasses directoryif you're worried about deleting them completely. This makes the upgrade much faster and will stop it hanging.
@John - Thanks for the tip, I was wondering if the size of the cfclasses directory was contributing to my issues. I'm going to try this tonight in hopes that it will solve all of my new found issues. Today, I'm seeing many of the following errors: "The tag handler query does not have a setter for the attribute ormOptions specified in the Tag Library Descriptor." This seems odd as the code does not use ORM at all.
@John - good luck! As for the error, orm does have an EntityToQuery function, which didn't return a CF query object in CF9, which has been fixed in CF9.01, so I suspect that the query classes may been changed. That's just a guess, so don't take it as fact :)
@John - I tried the upgrade again last night and the situation went from bad to worse. Believe it or not, the upgrade install completed successfully without hanging, but I was greeted with numerous errors from that point forward. I ended up biting the bullet and unistalling CF9 and starting from scratch with install CF9 then the 9.0.1 upgrade. This of course worked well and after setting up my site I was off an running again.
@John, glad it's all up and running, even if you had to go the long way round to get there!
Had pretty much the same issues with my upgrade (I had success on the dev server too!). I resorted to uninstalling and reinstalling CF9. You might want to make a copy of your datasource settings file first, as it took me a while to recreate them all... After that, the 9.0.1 update applied without a hitch.