Unable to load CF Administrator - Missing template error

​@Charlie Arehart ​@BKBK ​@Ravi Shankar266617537wjh Thanks for all your suggestions. I very much appreciate you taking your time to help us. After trying all the suggestions, we decided we will re-install CF on that server (hopefully sometime this week) and I am fairly certain that will resolve the issue. Thank you once again.

Hi ​@DevScreen , At this stage, I would tend to believe the error message. Some other process is probably running on or using port 8500 even after ColdFusion has stopped. Did you stop the other ColdFusion-related processes such as Add-On, .NET and ODBC?

To find which process is using port 8500:

1. Stop ColdFusion and every ColdFusion-related service. .
2. Open Windows Powershell, and run the command 

   Get-Process -Id (Get-NetTCPConnection -LocalPort 8500).OwningProcess

    

Does this problem of yours remain, now a few days on? If so, I have a couple of suggestions. (And if it’s resolved, perhaps this info may help others who find this thread in the future.)

1) Since your post showing netstat and tasklist showed it was clearly a coldfusion process, but the cfstop was not working, you could next try taskkill (the Windows command line tool to kill a process). When you showed it was running as process id 9560, this should have worked:

taskkill /f /pid 9560

If it reports that the process “could not be terminated” because “access denied”, it could be that it was running as a service. Indeed, your tasklist command suggests that.  You would need to run the command line “as admin”.

1a) And I’ll assume you had tried stopping the service. If somehow you find you “can’t” stop the service, then there is a very important point to note that about trying to this sort of process kill of the coldfusion.exe: you will find (if you rerun your tasklist or view Task Manager) that another coldfusion.exe will spin right up.

This is a little-known aspect of how the CF service works: it  actually launches a coldfusionsvc.exe process (as can be seen in the properties for it in the Windows Services panel).  That is what starting the CF service actually starts first, and that then starts the coldfusion.exe (so both will show in task manager or tasklist, when all is well).

That coldfusionsvc.exe then ALSO watches out for whether the coldfusion.exe process stops for any reason (not if it hangs or is slow), in which case it will start it again. If somehow you can’t seem to stop the service for some reason, then you should be able to use the taskkill on the coldfusionsvc.exe process that launched it instead.

If you have more than one coldfusionsvc.exe running, you will wonder which is which. Sadly, taskkill doesn’t list the “commandline” used to start the process, but powershell can. If you run it “as admin”, this will give you the processid and commandline:

(Get-CimInstance Win32_Process -Filter "Name = 'coldfusionsvc.exe'") | Select-Object ProcessID, CommandLine

That commandline will indicate the CF version and instance name (default is cfusion) that the service is running.

2) BTW, I’ll share for the sake of others that if instead you found the process holding the port to be a java.exe, that could be because you started the CF instance from within CF Builder and its “servers” tab. That does not start the service but instead launches CF as a java process. And you’d want to then stop that (in there or using your command line approach).

Of course, it’s always preferable to stop CF using such gentle means (stopping the service, cfstop, stopping in cfbuilder) than to just kill the process. But I understand you’re feeling you have no choice.

3) Also, as for the original problem (of the admin not working), you mentioned having re-run the web server config tool. Note that that was unnecessary: that controls the integration with “external” web servers like IIS or Apache, and since CF2016 that web server config feature blocks access to the CF Admin (the CFIDE folder) via such an external web server. We have to use the built-in web server, which defaults to that port 8500. 

(Even a workaround/trick that some used, modifying the block of !CFIDE in the connector uriworkermap.properties file found even that stopped working starting with connectors created after update 5 of CF2023 and update 21 of CF2021, released in Oct 2023.)

Of course, those who may use such external web servers and configure a forward proxy to port 8500 don’t hit that limit (as they are not using the connector created by the wsconfig tool), but then they are vulnerable to any CFIDE vulns that Adobe may suffer, including some fixed by the most recent update of June 30.

4) Finally, if you don’t resolve this entire problem (getting the update implemented, without such errors), I can assure you that we (you and I) can resolve it together via a shared desktop consulting sessions (where I merely guide you to resolve it, without any need for you to “give me control” or direct access). I help people resolve such update install problems about weekly.

I am confident I can help, and perhaps in as little as 15 minutes (I can’t commit to that, as I don’t know what we may face). I doubt we’d need even as much as an hour. I can promise that if you don’t find the time to be valuable, you won’t pay for it. Simple as that. For more on my rates, approach, satisfaction guarantee, online calendar, email, phone, and more, see the consulting page at carehart.org.

​@DevScreen , I would suggest that you

1. begin by stopping ColdFusion using, for example, the command C:\ColdFusion2023\cfusion\bin\cfstop.bat
2. then run the command C:\ColdFusion2023\cfusion\bin\cfstart.bat

Have you tried manually uninstalling the patch and going back to HF20?