Cloning a ColdFusion16 server on Windows Server 2016

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
June 20, 2018
2 replies
468 views

I have tried to clone my dev server to make test and UAT servers, but it has gone horribly awry.

IIS crashes after reboot as soon as you bring the cloned instance up. Uninstalling and reinstalling ISS fixes this, but then you can never connect ColdFusion back to IIS. If you try to run wsconfig.exe and add a web server, it just tells you that "All the IIS sites are already configured by some other version of ColdFusion.

I got ColdFusion support on the phone and we went through a bunch of things but could never find a root cause. We played with temp directories, reinstalled ColdFusion, turned off the Windows Process Activation Service, made dummy IIS sites running as a new user and then tried to connect to the dummy site, none of it work.

ColdFusion support seems out of answers. Anyone have any idea? I would hate to have to build every server from scratch rather than cloning.

This topic has been closed for replies.

B

Brons2_Author

Participant

We decided to just cut our losses and spin up fresh Windows VMs. Maybe we can try the cloning again on another project with the changes that have been suggested here. Thanks for the info.

D

Dave Watts

Community Expert

Some weird things happen when you clone Windows servers. Windows has unique identifiers for users, for example, and typically after cloning you need to replace these throughout your image.

My recommendation would be simply to clone your servers before running wsconfig. If for some reason you can't do that, you'll need to remove entries for wsconfig from your web.config and applicationHost.config files in IIS. These are XML files that are either located within the individual web sites in the case of web.config, or within your c:\windows\system32\inetsrv\config directory in the case of applicationHost.config. Then, you could safely rerun wsconfig.

Dave Watts, Fig Leaf Software

Dave Watts, Eidolon LLC

Charlie Arehart

Community Expert

Adding to Dave’s helpful answer, you will probably also find you need to remove the numbered folder(s) under CF’s config/wsconfig folder. And in that folder will be a wsconfig.properties, and you’d want to remove the non-commented lines from that, which are a mapping of the IIS site numbers to the numbered wsconfig folders.

Then you should find that the wsconfig tool does not complain.

And Brons, is you remain stuck and need this solved, I suspect we could resolve it in an online consulting session. I appreciate that you may have done that with Adobe and if it didn’t work with them, you may suspect no one else could fix things if they could not. But a) perhaps you didn’t do it online with them, or b) if they did not share what Dave and I have shared here, then that shows that they did not consider all that could be at issue. And even if these are not the solution, I may still be able to help you. You can learn more about my approach, rates, satisfaction guarantee, and more at the consulting page at carehart.org.

Dave may also be able to help remotely. His company, Fig Leaf, was recently sold and he’s now a man of leisure. That’s to our great benefit if it’s allowed him to contribute still more here, as he has for so many years. (Dave, if you may now be doing work elsewhere or under a new name, your LinkedIn profile currently still shows you at Fig Leaf.)

/charlie

/Charlie (troubleshooter, carehart. org)

D

Dave Watts

Community Expert

I'm not sure about that "man of leisure" part. I still work at Fig Leaf, although I'm now officially a consultant rather than the Chief Technology Officer.

Dave Watts, Fig Leaf Software

Dave Watts, Eidolon LLC

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