CF2018 - second instance responds with Tomcat 403 Forbidden status on any CF resource

My suggestion is that you install no website on the default instance, cfusion. Use this instance, where necessary, only for the configuration or management of the other instances. This means:

1) Delete the 2 sites you have installed so far, reverting ColdFusion to its initial state. Restart ColdFusion and start anew.

2) Use the Enterprise manager to create two new instances, dnw1 and dnw2 . That is, you now have 3 instances, dnw1, dnw2 and cfusion.

3) Proceed as you did before, configuring the sites "does.work.com" and "does-not.work.com" and connecting them respectively to dnw1 and dnw2.

In addition to what Priyank shared, I will add that you don't indicate if you had run the CF2018 update mechanism, after initially installing it. Did you? And if so, did you do that before or after you added the new instance? If you did it AFTER adding the new instance, did you tell the update mechanism to ALSO update the new instance?

This is important, because the 403 error MAY be related to an issue that is related to update 8 (or above). And if you may have run the wsconfig tool AFTER the update but BEFORE updating your new instance, you would be running the wsconfig tool that WAS updated against an instance that was NOT. I could see that leading to a problem.

So let's start with you just checking the CF Admin, for both the cfusion instance AND the new instance, to see what you see in the "settings summary" page (on the first admin "settings" menu item) or the "system info" page (top right "i" icon in the admin). Do both report 2018,0,9? or 0,8?, or do either show some earlier number? Please do be sure to report both. (You can confirm that you are looking at each admin, either by noting the changed port, such as 8500 and 8501, or more important note that the instance name appears in the top right, just under that "i" button and the "logout" link.)

And as for the 403 errors, they can occur after updating CF (to 8 or later) and then either NOT updating the wsconfig after that, or perhaps also needing to make another set of changes related to that change in update 8. I did a blog post with more detail, at https://www.carehart.org/blog/client/index.cfm/2020/3/20/how_and_why_sites_may_break_after_Mar_2020_CF_updates.

But before you may dig into that, Fabian, consider first what I ask above.

Also, one more tip: when you make your browser page test, are you doing it on the server itself, where IIS is running? If you do, then by default you should be given MORE detail from IIS about what it's unhappy about. I realize it may seem it must be about CF (since it happens only to CF pages for you), but the point is that sometimes IIS might give more detail--and the problem MAY be about an IIS configuration issue. And if you find that you do NOT get any "additional detail" while visiting a page on the server itself, that is controlled by a setting in the "error pages" feature in IIS for the site, and then see "edit feature settings" on the right (or by right-clicking in that page). The default is the 3rd option, detail for local requests, custom info for remote requests.

Bottom line, Fabian, this problem should be solvable, one way or another.

Hi,

if you have created the connector with all and then created the second instance. First, try removing both the connectors for instance1 and instance2. 

Create the connector with instance 1 to Site1 and the same for site 2 with instance 2 and see if that helps.