CF 2016 Scheduling Error

[Daniel28083795c2vc]

I'm recieving this message when i try to look up what shcedules are setup in this instance of CF. I'm not sure what or if there are schedules running but I get this message even after restarting the CF system. 

Server Details
Server Product	ColdFusion
Version	2016,0,03,301771
Edition	Standard
Operating System	Windows Server 2012 R2
OS Version	6.3
Adobe Driver Version	5.1.4 (Build 0001)
Tomcat Version	8.0.32.0

Error Occurred While Processing Request
The system has attempted to use an undefined value, which usually indicates a programming error, either in your code or some system code.
Null Pointers are another name for undefined values.

The error occurred in scheduletasks.cfm: line 201
-1 : Unable to display error's location in a CFML template.
Resources:
Check the ColdFusion documentation to verify that you are using the correct syntax.
Search the Knowledge Base to find a solution to your problem.
Browser Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/109.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
Remote Address 192.168.10.200
Referrer http://192.168.0.7:8500/CFIDE/administrator/navserver.cfm
Date/Time 24-Jan-23 08:47 AM
Stack Trace
at cfscheduletasks2ecfm438961078._factor29(/CFIDE/administrator/scheduler/scheduletasks.cfm:201) at cfscheduletasks2ecfm438961078.runPage(/CFIDE/administrator/scheduler/scheduletasks.cfm:1)

[w49369461]

I would patch CF 2016 to the latest hotfix. It might of been a bug that was fixed.

You are on HF 3 whereas I think they finished on HF 17

[Charlie Arehart]

While w49369461 may be on the right track, I am going to assume that this sched task page was "working" before, and now is failing--and "nothing changed", right?

1) In that case, it could be that the underlying file that tracks scheduled tasks has become corrupted.

Sadly that can happen for many reasons. See the coldfusion2016/cfusion/lib folder, and its neo-cron.xml file. If you could open that an editor that supports XML (and would format it nicely--or if you simply opened it with good ol' Internet Explorer, it formats XML nicely out of the box), you may see something to explain what's amiss. It may be that the file is empty, or has only a few lines, or is not well-formed XML.

And while CF makes a "bak" file of each neo file, it's only one generation bak. That file may be corrupted as well. (Try opening it, to see.)

2) If you may have any sort of file system backups, you may find that even restoring some very old one would be a better starting place to get back to things "working"--though you would lose whatever was changed since that backup was made.

Do note that you MUST restart CF for it to pick up that change if you put a new file in place.

3) Finally, you may wonder if you can just delete the file and let CF "start over", or empty out the file. Sadly, neither will work. 

You'd need to have a version of the file as is created by Adobe at installation of CF2016, and I'm not aware of there being any repository of those. (I have a repository of those for CF2021, within the cfmlrepo.com site, but I would NOT suggest you use any neo files for CF2021 with CF2021.)

4) But here's good news: I happen to have just confirmed that for the CF2016 I am running locally, I have not created any scheduled tasks, so I have attached here a "stock" version of that file. 

Unfortunately, I can't seem to upload it here in the forums site as either an xml, zip, or even txt file (which is very odd), so here it is in text:

<wddxPacket version='1.0'><header/><data><array length='4'><struct type='coldfusion.server.ConfigMap'></struct><boolean value='false'/><string></string><string>log,txt</string></array></data></wddxPacket>

Again, save off the neo-cron.xml you do now have (in case it has something useful), and create a new empty neo-cron.xml, then drop this text in save it, then restart CF. If using Windows Notepad, be SURE to change the drop-down in the file save popup so that it does not append a .txt to the end of the file name.)

And if somehow CF doesn't start, be prepared to revert back to the one you saved.  (FWIW, this is for my CF2016 that is running that latest update 17 that w49369461 was referring to. But it SHOULD work ok for your update 3 of CF2016.)

See if that at least lets you "start over". But it will of course NOT recover your old scheduled tasks. Only a restore of that file to something older will give you that, if the problem is with the file as you have it now.

Let us know how it goes.