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D
Dordrecht7177366
Inspiring
February 17, 2025
Answered

Cf Admin errors in CF2021 After upgrading to Update 18

  • February 17, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 1264 views

After I upgraded to update 18 on CF2021, I find that many of the administrator pages display errors like those below. I backed out the upgrade back to CF2021 Update 13 and the errors persist. The errors did not occur prior to the upgrade attempt. Anyone kno0w a solution?

 

(P.S. Sorry to be asking so many questions lately. I've been a ColdFusion user for 25 years and am much better at programming than debugging software versioning and installation issues.)

 

 

    Correct answer Dordrecht7177366

    By "if the former", that followed my question, "how did you uinstall CF? via the admin or the command line?" And now you've clarified that, as well as that the cf service is running as local system.

     

    As for the ongoing errors, I don't recognize them as having an obvious solution. Maybe someone else will. My suspicion is that you have made some manual configuration, whether in the admin or at the file system or command line. 90% of updates "just work", and 99% work with a couple of extra steps. Yours seems to be in the 1% that remain.

     

    Some would give up and reinstall. Others would suggest you uninstall and reinstall the update, while others may have you try to remove and RE-add all packages. Those may or may not work. And you seem to be saying you did the post-install workaround steps suggested on the Oct 2024 cf update. 

     

    If you just want to get things solved, I suspect we can do that in looking together at any of many things on your machine via a remote screenshare consulting session. We might solve it in as little as 15 minutes, my smallest billing increment. For more on my rates, approach, satisfaction guarantee, online calendar and more, see carehart.org/consulting.

     

    Otherwise let's see how things may go here. 


    @Charlie Arehart , thank you for the reply.  I went ahead and uninstalled CF altogether, then reinstalled CF2021 up to hotfix 18 yesterday morning. I used the admin to install the updates rather than using comand line. (I seem to have had better results dong it that way in the past.) Every install seemingly worked without any errors, and I joked to my supervisor that it seemed like a day I should purchase a lottery ticket. 🙂  My plan was to examine the logs for install errors more today, whcih I did. The only error I saw from yesterday's installs was:

    -----

    Feb 19, 2025 10:37:46 AM Information [main] - Package htmltopdf started...
    Feb 19, 2025 10:37:46 AM Error [main] - Unable to install htmltopdf package: java.lang.NullPointerException: Specified service reference cannot be null.

    -----

     

    Oddly, I see in the admin when I click the htmltopdf package that it is installed, so I'm not sure what happened there:

     

     

    I examined all of our code and we don't have any uses of cfhtmltopdf, so I expect that error will have no effect on us even if not installed.

     

    Thank you again for your assistance!

    1 reply

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    Dave Watts
    Community Expert
    February 17, 2025

    It looks like something happened to /CFIDE/administrator/jvm.cfm. I wouldn't expect this file to be changed when you upgrade, but it looks like it was in your case maybe? Anyway, I'd look for a backup of that file, then back up the current bad file and restore it with the backup of the good file. If you're doing your own filesystem backup - which you should! - you should be able to find the last good copy from before it was overwritten. Otherwise, I suspect CF itself has a copy of it somewhere ... but I'm not sure where offhand. If you have to go that route, you might want to drop to the command prompt, navigate to the CF root directory, then type something like this:

     

    dir jvm* /s

     

    Dave Watts, Eidolon LLC
    Charlie Arehart
    Charlie Arehart
    Community Expert
    February 17, 2025

    A few thoughts.

     

    1) First, to Dave's suggestion: note that the reference to the jvm.cfm is about it being the referrer--the page from which the failing page was requested.  So that's not the source of the error. BTW, I realize Dave knows what a referer page is. 🙂 Heck, he's probably who first taught me about them nearly 30 years ago! I clarified the meaning for other readers, and I suspect he just didn't notice the referrer indication. And hey, our eyes have done a LOT of work since then, getting old like us!

     

    So as for the original problem, there can be many possible explanations. I will say that I've not seen that specific reported error before.

     

    2) My initial suspicion would be an error during the update install, and yes also perhaps during the update uninstall you did. There is a log of each in the cfusion/hf-updates folder for the update number that you installed/uninstalled. Look at about line 70 of either log. Is the count of fatalerrors or nonfatalerrors other than 0? If so, how did you uinstall CF? via the admin or the command line? If the former, was CF running as a service with localsystem as the user running the service? If the latter and you're on Windows, did you use "run as admin" to open that command prompt?

    3) Then there can be errors during the install of package updates (which happen automatically if an update incorporates updates to packages you're running). Those package updates take place on the next CF startup that's kicked off after the update. Look at the coldfusion-out.log. Any errors during the package updates? If there are errors there, what are they? 

    If there are no errors during the update or during the package updates at startup, we then need to consider other possibilties.

     

    4) Since you jumped from update 13 to 18, note that as of update 17 there was a known issue calling for "clearing the felix cache" to resolve various issues (and that problem has hit more folks since that note listed its 3 known issues). You may want to try that. Just stop CF, delete the folder felixcache folder in cfusion/bin, then start CF. CF will recreate that for you. Then try the Admin.

     

    Some may suggest you could delete as well the cfusion/wwwroot/WEB-INF/cfclasses. I would recommend renaming it instead, as there can be some useful info in there for diagnosing certain other problems. Anyway, do that also while CF is down, then restart it and test the Admin.

     

    5) If none of that is it, let's here what you have to say and we can respond based on that.

    I'll note that if you may just need to "get it done", I'll say I'm confident we could find and resolve whatever was amiss in a remote screenshare consulting session. We may not need more than 15 mins, my minimum time. If interested, you can find my rates, approach, satisfaction guarantee, online calendar, and more at carehart.org/consulting. I could even meet this evening if this is time critical. But I realize you may not see this is a task worth paying for assistance to resolve. Just wanted to offer that.

     

    Others may offer still more "things to try".   Let's see how things go.

    /Charlie (troubleshooter, carehart. org)
      D
      Dordrecht7177366Author
      Inspiring
      February 18, 2025

      Thanks, @Charlie Arehart 

      Referencing your #2:

      I did both the install and the uninstall from the CF Admin. The install and uninstall logs show no errors:

      -----

      Installation: Successful.

      1659 Successes
      0 Warnings
      0 NonFatalErrors
      0 FatalErrors

      -----

      Uninstallation: Successful null

      1481 Successes
      1 Warnings
      0 NonFatalErrors
      0 FatalErrors

      -----

      I'm not sure what is meant by "If the former, was CF running as a service with localsystem as the user running the service?" In Services, the Cf Application Server shows "Local System" in the Log On As column value. 

      #3:
      The server.log shows the following errors around the time I did the install/uninstall. I'm not sure which of those caused the errors. Possibly I had the lib dir open in file explorer during the installation?

      "Registration error for service manager : .http://127.0.0.1:8993/PDFgServlet/.Reason: SERVER ERROR"

       

      "Unable to install SQL package: coldfusion.server.ServiceRuntimeException: java.io.FileNotFoundException: (CF_Home redacted)\lib\neo-drivers.xml (The requested operation cannot be performed on a file with a user-mapped section open)"

       

      "Unable to install htmltopdf package: java.lang.NullPointerException: Specified service reference cannot be null."


      #4

      I did the suyggested folder operations. They did not fix the issue.

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