You may have mistakenly applied an 8.0 CHF on a 8.0.1 CF server, and not realize it!
Note: This blog post is from 2009. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily.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 just helped a customer today solve a problem where he swore he had applied the latest Cumulative Hotfix (CHF) for CF 8.0.1, but I showed him that instead he had mistakenly applied the CHF for 8.0. I know how it happened, and showed him. I hope how you can avoid the same mistake.
Update: David Collie of Adobe has informed us (via comments below) that he has now fixed the two pages with the problems reported here. We thank him so much! Even so, the rest of the information still stands, since some may have suffered the problem of getting the wrong hotfixes while the problem was in place, or even despite his changes, so I'll leave this entry as is to help them.
The problem: you may have applied CHFs for 8.0 by mistake
When checking to confirm if an 8.0.1 server has applied the CF 8.0.1 cumulative hotfixes, make sure that the file in the [cf_root]/lib/updates directory has a jar file name with "801" in its name, like chf8010003.jar. The problem is that it could easily, mistakenly be an 8.0 CHF instead, such as chf8000003.jar (note the "800" reference).
How could that happen? More in a moment. But the problem is that CF wouldn't complain about this (while applying the fix in the CF Admin or if you just dropped it into the lib/updates and restarted CF.) It would just be ignored, and the CHF would not do anything--and you would NOT get the updates you expected in the 8.0.1 CHF.
The root cause of the mistake
So how does this happen? I know at least one source of the confusion. I've complained over and over about this: there's an updates page at the Adobe site which starts out offering a link to the 8.0.1 update (itself). There are no CHFs for it. Rather, the problem is that right after its shown, the page lists the 8.0.0 CHFs! See the screenshot below.
The problem is simply that no one has gone back and updates this page to put the links to the 8.0.1 CHFs. They're just not there.
So many people may easily miss that those are in fact the CHFs for 8.0, not 8.0.1. Worse, since there 3 of them (just as some may know there are 3 for 8.0.1, currently), it's even easier for someone to make this mistake and think they're getting the 8.0.1 CHFs.
Again, since applying them gives no error, I would bet that many are in this situation and don't even realize it (and are not getting the benefits of the hotfixes.) So follow those instructions above and check to ensure that you really do have a jar with 801 in the name (in either [ColdFusion8]\lib\updates in Server mode, or in [JRun4]\servers\[instancename]\cfusion.ear\cfusion.war\WEB-INF\cfusion\lib\updates in Multiserver mode. Note that the "." in cfusion.ear and cfusion.war is instead cfusion-ear and cfusion-war, for the cfusion instance only.)
Is the customer to blame for being careless?
Some may sneer that those who make this mistake "get what they deserve", and that it's about "thinning the herd", if people are "so careless". Sorry, I don't agree.
This is a very easy mistake to make, especially for folks who by and large don't spend their days doing this sort of stuff, who might easily assume that what followed the 8.0.1 update on that page was its hotfixes.
And since this "updates" page I pointed to is what's offered on the right of the CF product page, it's just all the more easy to be found--and unfortunate that this problem has been allowed to linger.
So where does one find the 8.0.1 CHFs? and CFH 3?
I wish I could point you to one page that lists links all the the 8.0.1 CHFs, but sadly, that's still another point of annoyance. Some will know that there is this page, ColdFusion Hot Fixes (ColdFusion 8 and later).
But guess what, even IT does not have the CHF 3 listed! :-(
Please, Adobe, fix these things.
You can find CHF 3 for CF 8.01 here.
Anyway, do bookmark that updates page. We can only hope that in the future it will be the place to keep an eye on the latest CHFs for each release of CF going forward.
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I've also suggested to Adobe they improve the whole hot fix installation process. I recently applied 5 hot fixes across nearly 40 instances of CF, which took me the best part of a day to do manually. I dont get why the CF Administrator hasn't got a "check for updates" page which let you select the fixes to install for your CF version.
Even most of the shareware on my pc at home does this. Its simply not acceptable on an enterprise server application like CF.
regards,
Adobe's way of dealing with updates is quite poor and not very informative, it is also imposisble to tell what updates you installed without physically checking jar files, and this wont tell you about any other type sof update.
the other thing that's really frustrating is that most of the time you have to look around the blogsphere in order to find out that a new hotfix was released since adobe doesn't announce it. just google around and look for posting about the release of hotfix 2 and 3 for 8.0.1 and you'll see what i mean.
i haven't a clue about who's in charge at abode about dispersing this information to the community and keeping it up to date. in any case someone isn't doing their job.
If it's a security update don't you want to upload them all anyway? Why go through all the trouble of offering a solution to one problem and the a separate solution for another if the solutions are exactly the same??
AMEN BROTHER!!!!!!!!!
@John, as for why Adobe doesn't build a feature into to auto check for updates, the argument I've heard is that "many CF sites are on servers set to block communication outbound from the server". OK, so those people couldn't benefit from the feature. Another is that some folks are hypersensitive to a machine in their environment making calls out (even if they don't block them). OK, so such a feature could be made so it could be disabled by them, or even disabled by default. Just seems a shame to throw the baby out with the bathwater, with these two issues.
@Doug, as for why the updates page still offers 8.0 CHFs, that's a reasonable question. But considering that the document even has 7 CHFs, it seems simply to be a document that's been added to over time--just mysteriously not since the 8.0.1 CHFs came out, which seems the only mistake.
I could see some who were on 8 early on (and maybe still are) being a little reluctant to do a wholesale reinstall (which would be required to move from 8 to 8.0.1), whereas applying CHFs is easy. Still, now a couple years on, it certainly seems that the benefits of moving to 8.0.1--and it's 3 CHFs--would outweigh the pain of doing the upgrade from 8 to 8.0.1, especially since it's free. (I'm glad to see the 7.02 CHFs still there, as many sites have still not yet paid to upgrade 7 to 8.)
Of course, with the release of 9, CF 7 will be no longer supported, but I see the page even still points to a page for 6 CHFs. Really, it seems that the solution here on this page would be for each release to have a link to the installer, and then to a page with info on the CHFs. But as I noted in my final section, there IS in fact a page that lists 8.0.1 CHFs, but it also has not been updated to list the CHF3, which goes to @Tony's point.
In that regard, thanks very much @John for stepping up to offer the RSS feed. Of course, many will argue that Adobe should be doing it, but until they do, it's certainly better than nothing. (I've raised concerns about the problems with the Adobe technote and hotfix feeds before, http://www.carehart....)
I do agree with all who say that the update process can and should be improved. I didn't address that in this entry, as it seemed to go without saying. :-) But if this has served as another chance for folks to try to communicate their dismay about it, fair enough.
I don't know if anyone from Adobe will see this, or if they would respond here. My main goal was really just to get the word to people to be very careful about ensuring that they really had applied an 8.0.1 CHF if that was their intention. Thanks for your support in validating that concern, and indeed, please spread the word. I think it may be a problem for many others.
With regards to the "Updates" page, will try and get a change for that page as soon as possible. Thanks for the feedback.
And John, thanks for sharing the news of your CFUpdater tool, another nice solution.
I found mine at d:\JRun4\servers\{CF_Instance_name}\cfusion.ear\cfusion.war\WEB-INF\cfusion\lib\updates.
Once found, however, it appears there is an easy way to reverse hotfixes by stopping the CF instance and then removing the .jar file from the folder. Of course there is still the issue of restoring the correct /cfide folder (you did back this up before you started your hotfixing, right?).
But I referred to it as [JRun4]\servers\[instancename]\cfusion-ear\cfusion-war\WEB-INF\cfusion\lib\updates, when technically, only the cfusion instance uses dashes, and all the others use . (like cfusion.war). Thankfully CF10 will stop that madness. :-)
Anyway, I tweaked my reference to list both (in case you had searched for cfusion.war and not found it in the text above).