If you've recently applied CF2021 update 15 or are planning to, you need to be aware of a known issue which can cause unexpected removal of some CF packages (modules) which occurs upon the CF restart after installing the update: specifically it's the document, htmltopdf, pdf, presentation, print, and report modules. The good news is that these are easily added back, either using the CF Admin or via the cfpm command-line tool (added in CF2021).

In this post, I discuss this issue, those options for adding them back, and I also share how I'd found the underlying root cause of the problem: the update has a mistaken internal indication that these packages were updated in this update, when they were not. I'm hoping that Adobe may soon be fixing the problem by creating a new update file, to at least benefit those doing this update going forward. I'll share also the bug report for that (and another on a related matter, about installing multiple packages via cfpm).

TLDR

If you just want to "solve the problem" caused in applying this update 15, simply go into the CF Admin and its "Package Manager" page, go to its "Available Packages" section, and click each of those to install them. (Couldn't you also click the "Install All" button offered there? Yes, but there are reasons to be careful about that. Couldn't you use the cfpm tool? Again, yes. I will address both these points and more, below.)

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Don't miss that Adobe had added a useful feature (a "patch", made available in Apr 2024) to help in identifying any CFML code you may have which refers "implicitly" to scopes that would no longer searched (for any variables without a scope prefix), which is the new default behavior for CF2021, CF2023 and beyond as of the March 2024 updates (updates 13 and 7, respectively).

TLDR; (more on each of these points, in the rest of this post)

• For more on the update and the change regarding searchimplicitscopes, see my blog post on the March update
• By following the simple couple of steps (including downloading a needed "patch" as discussed and linked to below), CF will start logging (to a new unscoped.log) whenever code is run that would access an unscoped variable when that would cause CF to implicitly search through scopes (external to the request) which it would no longer search if "searchimplicitscopes" was false. (To be clear, the new logging only works if searchimplicitscopes is true, otherwise such searching would fail if searchimplicitscopes is false, as is the new default as of the March 2024 updates)
• The "patch" is a jar which you must manually obtain and put into place--it is NOT included with the March 2024 CF update, or any others. The steps are very simple, discussed below or in an Adobe technote that was released in the weeks after the March updates, with the title: View unscoped variables in a log file
• Note that this patch is also NOT included in the June 2024 CF updates, CF2021 update 14 and CF2023 update 8
• Further, beware that if you DO apply any update to CF after applying this patch, that update will REMOVE this "patch" (and any jars in the lib/updates folder which is referred to in the technote). Therefore, you would need to put the jar BACK in manually after any such CF update, for it to continue doing its logging
• Finally, FWIW, note that you can even leverage this patch in the CF two updates PRIOR to the March 2024 updates which introduced the change in the default for searchimplicitscopes, so updates 5/6 and 11/12, respectively. That means someone could also use this patch to test BEFORE moving to either the March 2024 updates or later

Again, more on each of these points below. But for some, the news and the link to the technote (and my couple of tips above) may be all they feel they need to hear. For others, I think more perspective may help, so read on for that.

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This is important news for those using CF's feature to store sessions (session variables for all sessions) in Redis.

Some folks, using it with CF2021 or 2023 found CF was somehow heavily impacting their Redis instance. The good news is that I've found an easy fix/workaround (until Adobe fixes it formally).

For more (including why you may or may NOT be impacted by the issue), read on.

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I'm delighted to announce that I've been selected to speak at Into the Box 2024, in DC, coming up in May. This will be my 5th time presenting at this wonderful event, going back to my first time in 2017.

My talk will be...

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Here's something new to beware, a change in the most recent Oracle JDK installers for Java 11 or 17 (since Jan 2023) which could break your apps which rely on Java, whether on Windows, macOS, or via RPM, where the new Oracle jdk installer WILL REMOVE any previous updates of that JVM version that were created by previous JDK installers of that same major version. And it will do pretty much without warning, which may be a confusing shock for those caught unaware. Let me explain.

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In a post today on his blog, Ben Nadel did an experiment "Looking At The Performance Overhead Of A Read-Only Lock". (He happened to do it in Lucee, but the concept applies equally to CF.)

And I wanted to offer some additional thoughts--first planning to offer them as a comment--because there's a lot behind the question and his observations. But as it got longer, I realized it was too long for a comment. Also, I didn't want people to think (in reading a comment on Ben's blog) that I was challenging Ben or questioning his understanding of the matter! Not at all. :-) Instead, I was just wanting to add more context, to help other readers, and based on my years of observing the community.

What I offer here is pretty much exactly what I wrote, but I have added headings, to help readers here:

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Note: This blog post is from 2020. 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.

Updated, Feb 2022

This question, "How can I keep CF Admin settings in sync between multiple servers or instances?" was asked today on the Adobe CF forums. The person had CF instances on multiple servers and lamented having to login to each CF admin to make changes that would apply equally to all instances, in particular creating or changing datasources.

They wondered if in fact there was a feature in the CF Admin to "cluster" datasource definitions, like there is (since CF2016 Enterprise) the feature to "cluster" scheduled tasks.

While I explained that there was not such a "feature" to sync CF admin settings generally across instances, I added that there WERE at least a couple of options one could consider using to achieve the goal. (And as an update after I wrote this in Apr 2020, note that CF2021 came out a few months later offering still one more.) My answer elaborating things (as is my wont) was long enough that I should have probably created a blog post instead. After submitting it, I decided to do just that, here (and I have tweaked here what I said, with some more elaboration and links).

Short answer: there are different tools that might be considered to help with this task (especially automating it), and a couple more that some may consider:

• the CFConfig tool within CommandBox, a powerful and automatable command line tool which uses json files and could allow you to sync things, even across CF versions and between CF and Lucee
• the CF2021 cfsetup tool, a new command line tool which also uses json files and could allow you to sync things, for CF2021 and even earlier version
• the CF Admin API (minimalist and manual), which you'd have to code to sync settings or set them in a synced manner
• the CF CAR file feature deserves a mention also, though its use can't be automated (it seems)
• I would advise AGAINST the seeming "shortcut" of copying neo xml files, especially between different servers or CF versions (same with using symlinks, etc.)

For more on all this, read on.

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Note: This blog post is from 2020. 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 is a critical warning to anyone who may apply the recent CF2018 Update 8 or CF2016 Update 14, released Tuesday of this week (on Mar 20, 2020). And readers in the future should note it will apply if and as you may update CF from any update BEFORE this one to any update AFTER this one.

To be clear, I do not mean with this warning to suggest that you should NOT apply the update! It implements an important security fix.

Instead, it's that after applying it, your CF web sites served via IIS or Apache WILL likely break initially, until you take one at least and perhaps two extra steps. The good news is that these steps are both easy and documented by Adobe in the update technotes, but they do require that someone do them, if needed. Let me explain.

[Update: I did an abbreviated version of this post on the Adobe CF portal: Three reasons your sites may break, and how to fix them, after applying March 2020 update to CF2018 or 2016. Note I also titled it differently. Just trying many ways to get people's attention. That post may interest some, either to read first (but my TLDR below also tries to abbreviate things also), or especially if you may prefer to give others a link to a post on this matter that is not as "dense" as this one. :-) I do point to this post from there, of course, for the many additional details that some may appreciate.]

Sadly, because many people don't bother to read the CF update technotes (linked to below), and they just apply the CF updates, they are not noticing this issue until they or their users start screaming because their sites are down. There's also a fair bit of "screaming" in the CF community, and folks responding may not know the info that I (or Adobe) have shared, to get things "working again", so I hope this helps bring some calm, and most important the clear solution/s needed.

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Note: This blog post is from 2020. 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 have a really simple solution to offer here, for a problem that has been nagging people running ColdFusion for the past few years. This post may also benefit those NOT running CF, especially if they have found confusing/conflicting information about the Java metaspace error and jvm argument that relates to it.

Perhaps you're getting errors referring to "metaspace" or "OutOfMemoryError: Metaspace", whether in your web sites, error logs, or even the CF Admin, and you wonder "what to do". Or you may be getting odd occurrences of blank pages, and if you look in your coldfusion-error.log you are finding such metaspace errors.

TLDR; In all these cases, the solution is simple (and may seem contrarian to some ears): REMOVE the maxmetaspace element from your JVM arguments. Indeed, I would go so far as to say everyone should simply remove it, even BEFORE you may get errors.

In the post that follows, I will explain how to remove it, including how you need to be VERY careful when doing that. You may also wonder why I recommend removing it, versus raising it. I cover that, as well as a bug report I filed with Adobe related this tis (which was fixed as of CF2021), below.

I also created an abbreviated version of this post, on the Adobe CF portal, if that may interest some readers.

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Note: This blog post is from 2020. 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 trying to run a request against CF 2016 (or perhaps 11), and the URL you're using has a path which starts with /api, you may find that the request fails to run (it may give a blank page). What gives? (It was related to the CF2016 API Manager, not CF's REST services feature.)

And what can you do about it, if you are on CF2016 or 11, and you want to use /api for your URLs? There are are two choices, depending on your needs: in brief, you can either:

• change your /api folder to a new name (which I realize may not appeal to all to some)
• or change the CF configuration, to STOP it treating /api specially for the API Manager's use. You would do this by editing two CF config files, urlworkermap.properties and web.xml (but this will break the ability of the API Manager to introspect REST services in CF2016 or CF11, though not CF2018)

TLDR; if you're bold and a risk taker, you can jump to the bottom to see my list of changes to make for that second option. As is often the case, there is risk in making changes in a cavalier fashion. There are various things to consider, and I warn of them below--but the good news is that this is a change that may take only minutes to do, once you've been careful to read about how to do it effectively.

Read on for more, including pros and cons of each choice, what to change and where, why this problem NO LONGER happens from CF2018 onward, and more.

(And if you are not familiar with the CF Enterprise API Manager, which is installed separately from CF, you can read about it here.)

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