Proper procedure for removing Auto-Lockdown after migration to new version of ColdFusion?

Question

I’m curious how others are handling the removal of the old Auto-Lockdown program during or after a migration to a newer version of ColdFusion. My current migration process is roughly:

Shut down the CF 2021 Windows service
Run the CF 2025 installer and Migration Wizard
Run the CF 2021 wsconfig to remove the web server
Run the CF 2025 wsconfig to add the web server

That all works as expected, but when it comes time to remove CF 2021 and the Auto-Lockdown tool, I’m not clear on the best way to handle that. I can uninstall CF 2021 without an issue, but when I go to uninstall the Auto-Lockdown tool it suggests it’s going to revert a bunch of settings in IIS, the current CF install, and it will remove the .cfuser account. My guess is that I need to allow it to do those things and then I’ll have to run the Auto-Lockdown for CF 2025, and unfortunately, reconfigure any permissions that were lost when the .cfuser account was recreated.

Any recommendations would be appreciated. Thanks

Charlie Arehart · Answer

That's an interesting question. Maybe others (including Adobe) will offer better thoughts, but my sense is that this is not the use case that was anticipated by those who created that autolockdown tool.

Instead I suspect they built it intending that one would use it in a given machine to secure that given cf version (and all it touches). Even the uninstall of the tool alone can be dicey, if one wanted to undo what they found it had done. (I always strongly advise people to take a full os backup or snapshot before installing the tool, given all it touches.)

But you're right that doing that long after installing it, and your having tweaked things for the cf user, it's a daunting prospect to redo it on the same server for a new cf version. Of course if one had automated all such tweaks they'd done, it would be easy to restore them. That's just not how a lot of folks operate.

Sorry I don't have a better answer. And maybe someone else will, but I wanted to offer at least this for your consideration/commiseration.

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