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Palyne
Participant
July 8, 2021
Question

Using CF10 (shared hosting) for Amazon S3 (old hash/sign don't work on S3 now)

  • July 8, 2021
  • 1 reply
  • 107 views

A lot of shared hosting uses very old versions of ColdFusion. Mine at dailyrazor only uses v10 and apparently I have no serious options for upgrade (at least affordably). (July2021)

 

All the CF10 examples and docs now don't work for amazon S3 (cfhttp, cfdirectory, cffile) because S3 now requires the version 4 signage of credentials, and the hash options of the old CF versions don't handle that. At least... that is what I seem to get from everything I'm reading.

 

So how do people still using old versions of coldfusion, interact with S3? Is there some workaround? Would greatly appreciate any guidance.  PJ

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    1 reply

    Charlie Arehart
    Community Expert
    Charlie ArehartCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    July 8, 2021

    I'll leave others to address any possible workarounds for accessing S3 from cf10. But let's address your observation that you see "no serious options for upgrade (at least affordably)". Since you are on a host, do you mean they offer no options?

     

    If you are willing to move, there are many cf hosting companies that support more recent cf versions. And really, if a host still runs cf10 especially in shared hosting, that's something to be very wary about.  Cf10 stopped getting updates--including security updates--four years ago. I would not want to be running on such a server, especially with others (which only increases the attack exposure).

     

    So where can you turn? I list cf hosting alternatives at cf411.com/cfhosts. And these are orgs who promote and have long offered cf, some at reasonable prices especially for shared hosting, which can also be implemented more securely than some hosts realize.

     

    While I appreciate that moving is a pain, as is dealing with an upgrade, it's part of life in IT. And it's not just you who are at risk but your org and your customers. Think of it like if your house and business were in a part of town that had become dangerous, maybe because of a chemical leak. At some point, pragmatism or wisdom should win out over lethargy or nostalgia.

     

    But maybe someone will offer you the "gas mask" of an S3 workaround, to let you keep operating in that danger zone. 

    /Charlie (troubleshooter, carehart. org)
    P
    PalyneAuthor
    Participant
    July 9, 2021

    Thanks. I've arranged for some Lucee/MySQL hosting and I'll work on moving the site gradually. This is a hobby site for me, not a client site. Although Lucee doesn't seem to be on the 2021-coldfusion equal footing either, it's either 2016 or 2018, in any case late enough it should work with S3 which is my biggest need. Nice page of resources you have there, I bookmarked it.

     

    Charlie Arehart
    Community Expert
    Charlie ArehartCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    July 9, 2021

    Sure, that's another solution that makes sense for some. I will clarify that you'd not want to expect that it's on "equal footing" with CF2018 or 2016, if by that you mean "compatible" such that "code written for CF2021 will not be compatible with Lucee but code written for one of those versions will be" .

     

    Rather, as you may have learned, it's that both engines do things that the other does, and each does things that the other does not. While some people will find code they wrote (for any version of CF) "just works", others may find that "nothing seems to work", and most will experience something in between (similar to making a move from one CF version to another).

     

    So my point is simply to clarify that we'd not want to leave the impression that Lucee is somehow fully compatible with CF2018 or 2016. And sadly there's no resource that completely documents what the compat issues are (again just like there's none for compat issues between CF versions, either). But if that move works for you, great.

     

    Again, the point of my last response was to warn against anyone else who may want to "stick with CF10 for any reason". Being on anything earlier than CF2018 is risk, as even CF2016 got its last update in March.  

    /Charlie (troubleshooter, carehart. org)
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