We recently got a shiny new cloud server from those nice chaps at Sagari, a rather juicy beat with 8GB of RAM and twin Xeon processors. I downloaded ColdFusion 8 from the Adobe website and installed it, but the darn thing refused to work in any way, shape or form. After some digging I finally twigged that ColdFusion needs to be installed under the root (admin) account in order to work properly. So, uninstall, changed login, re-install, and all was well, except now our serial number wasn't accepted. Perplexed, I phoned Adobe, who pinged me around a few different people, finally I ended up speaking to an American chap in the Philippines, who said they'd have a look into it and get back to us. I'm never comfortable with "we'll get back to you" in business speak, as 9 times out of 10 it means "go away and stop bothering us".
True to their word though, a very pleasant Adobe technician from Mumbai phoned us, and explained that we have a serial number that's only good for the 'standard' ColdFusion 8 server, and as we're running Windows 2008 Data Centre edition, it's expecting a 64-bit key. Two solutions are available - we could either liaise with Adobe and swap our 32-bit key for a 64-bit one, or we could re-download the full CF8 product from the Adobe download manager, which is slightly different to the generic download offered on their public-facing site. I opted for the second solution, a 380mb download, and our key was immediately approved, and the 32-bit version installed correctly. All I had to do then was to put IIS7 into 32-bit mode (advanced settings - enable 32-bit = true), and it worked perfectly. It's a slightly odd problem, but understandable, as CF8 is a few years old now and operating systems are changing on a regular basis.
We did have a slight issue getting the SQL Express JDBC drivers working, after downloading them and unsuccessfully trying to use the default "sqljdbc.jar" file, I tried changing to the "sqljdbc4.jar" file, with no joy. It turns out that ColdFusion had cached and locked an older version of this file, the only solution was to stop the CF8 service, remove the old file and re-copy the new one, then start it again. I guess this will be true of all the JAR files in use by CF, changing any of them will require a service re-start, and caching is always on the cards.
All fairly minor problems, but together they've added up to a few days of extra faffing around, and delays to the project, and reminded me that paying a bit more for a managed server from dedicated ColdFusion host might not be such a daft idea after all.
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