CF8 on Win03 - Blewup IIS?

[csgaraglino]

When installing CF8 on Windows 2003 II6 (32bit) this morning I lost IIS? It would no longer serve even HTML pages.

[Charlie Arehart]

We need more information to really help, but here are some things to check:

- are the web sites "stopped" in the IIS interface, perhaps? You can see the word "stopped" to the right of them in the interface, and right-click to start.

- how many web sites do you have (as shown in the IIS interface)? Are requests to all of them failing?

- and are requests for all types of files failing? (htm, cfm, jpg, etc)

- are you sure you're using the URL that IIS expects? Sometimes what you expect should work is not what it expects should work. Here's a trick: try drilling into a web site, into the directories and file names, and right-click one to choose "browse". That causes IIS to open the file at what it thinks to be the URL for that site. If that works, maybe you were using something else, and then need to reconcile that.

- is the whole IIS server stopped, perhaps? If you view it in Windows services (world wide web service), is it running?

- if you restart IIS, does it help (sometimes, installing software that changes IIS requires it to be restarted). Right-click on the server name in IIS, choose all tasks>restart IIS

- you can also check the windows event logs (Start>Control Panel>Admin Tools>Event Viewer) to view the "system log", to see if there are any messages for the W3SVC source (messages from IIS).

That's at least a few things to start with. Let us know how it goes.

/charlie arehart

charlie@carehart.org

Providing CF and CFBuilder troubleshooting services

at http://www.carehart.org/consulting

[csgaraglino]

- Only 3 are set to stopped and these are deliberate - the rest are running. - There are 53 websites running - yes, html and cfm are faining - yes - no, but I will say this - when I tried to stop the WWWPS service it system could mot on the first try. It hung with a "stopping" status. I then had to stop IIS Admin Service, which in turn stopped the WWWPS - no, see above - I did not see anything in there that was cause for concern? I have sense restored this system back to last night (This is a VMWare snapshot) and I will be attempting this again in the morning - but I am not comfortable not knowing what happened?

[Charlie Arehart]

@csgaraglino, I just have to say that you've made it hard for people to appreciate what points you're responding to. Please help us help you. I had to go back and find my message to piece together what responses went with what questions. Even then, it's not clear: are you saying all requests for all file types fail on all web sites? That would seem quite odd. What's the exact failure message?

That said, there is a "wildcard mapping" that's added to either the root ("web sites") or specific sites, whichever you told the CF installer or web server config tool to connect to CF (all sites, or selected sites). You may want to check that the path for that is correct for wherever CF is installed on your box. Also, have you restarted CF after installing it? It does tell you to do so. That may be all that's wrong.

If not, let us know more as you learn it.

/charlie

[csgaraglino]

Sorry for the jumbled response - when this thing is not in the WYSIWYG editor it seems to strip out all the carriage returns?

I was getting a timeout error on the browser. When I would try to browse a CFM or HTML page, the browser would just hang and then get tired of waiting.

I'll have to check the mapping in the morning when I try this again.

I have been cleaning up a few things and I hope this might help the installation go a little better.

I have fixed an issue with datasource passwords - seems that the install does not like PW with percent signs in them.

I also cleared out all the verity indexes - they are easy to rebuild,  but this is less data that the install has to worry about.

I also removed the old website that were no longer needed.

[Charlie Arehart]

But did you just try restarting CF first?

/charlie

[csgaraglino]

Yes...

I even rebooted the server...

[Charlie Arehart]

OK. If you don't end up solving it, I'll note that there are folks (like myself) who can assist you with that, online (over the web), short-term and at a relatively low cost. I appreciate that most expect things should just work, or that they ought to get free support when they need it. Just saying that when those options run out, there are other alternatives. More at http://www.cf411.com/#cfassist. Sometimes having someone "look over your shoulder" can work a lot faster and better than lots of back and forth emails. But to be clear, you can indeed get free support from myself and many others here.

/charlie arehart

charlie@carehart.org

Providing CF and CFBuilder troubleshooting services

at http://www.carehart.org/consulting

[csgaraglino]

I'll have to say that you are a Rock Star!

I really appriciate all the help I have recieved here on these forums - and I hope that I can return the fave to someone else as oon as I get out of this mess!

If I can't figure this out I'll give you a call. I just printed your contact info - thanks again!

[carl type3]

Hello,

Is anything useful being reported in EVENTVWR.msc? Sometimes the logs there can assist in a case like this.

HTH, Carl.

[Charlie Arehart]

Thanks for the kind regards. Don't know about the "rock star" appellation, though. There are lots of other folks here with still more mad skillz. But we are all here to help each other.

/charlie

[carl type3]

Oh spoil, it is the end of year so nice time to hand out accolades.

+ 1 for rock star status to charlie

Cheers, Carl.

[Charlie Arehart]

I guess I shouldn't speak up to say that, regarding your last note, I'd already suggested that he look in Event Viewer.

Doh, ok, I guess I just did. Thanks for the kind regards anyway Carl.

/charlie

[carl type3]

Ahh look at that I see now and you said to check W3SVC events.

Better mark me down on the short list for goose of the forum 😉

Apologies to original poster for chatting all over your thread.

Cheers, Carl.

[csgaraglino]

No worries from the original poster! I am truly enjoying the intilic of these forums.  I have been programing CF in a cave since 1994 and mostly alone - this is an incredible opportunity for me to interact on a an intellectual level.  Trust me I love my horses, even the communications with them has been very rewarding - but I'm told by many that I need friends with two legs - not four?

[carl type3]

Plenty of interesting 2 legged (woops not to forget those on wheels or otherwise) type CF people here:

http://www.meetup.com/coldfusionmeetup/

Cheers, Carl.

[Charlie Arehart]

Thanks for that shout out, Carl.

I run the CFMeetup, which would indeed be a nice way for anyone wanting "more CF conversation". It's a weekly online CF user group (sometimes twice a week). Carl was in fact a speaker just last week. We have a variety of topics, from Admin to coding to client app development to mobile development and everything in between. There's a chat area where you can ask questions or just interact with fellow CFers.

/charlie

[csgaraglino]

So I think I have figured out what the problem, I just don't know how to fix it it.

The issue seems to be in the W3 Service not being able to stop during the installation.

I cannot manually stop it either - it just hangs?

This may be residule form the Win2k to 2003 upgrade?

[Dave Watts]

Maybe you can stop it before you do the install.

Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software

http://www.figleaf.com/

http://training.figleaf.com/

Read this before you post:

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/607238

[csgaraglino]

I tried mannually stopping it and it just hangs. The hosting company that provides the software (they did the OS upgrade) is looking into it now to see what the issue with W3S is. Hopefully they can figure it out?

[csgaraglino]

Update: The hosting company made some updates to the server this morning and I was able to upgrade with no issues! (yeah!) I am going to let this run today - and then attempt the update in the morning.

[Charlie Arehart]

I saw you later resolved things, but in case it may help others in the future, I'll share two thoughts on your observation of the stop of the service hanging.

First, note that with stopping any service, you don't need to let that progress bar proceed until it pops up that message. That interface is just a convenience for if you want to watch and see the action taking place (finishing). It has a default (that's configurable) of how long it will allow the requested action to take. If that progress bar reaches the end, then you get the popup saying it couldn't complete in time.

But you can instead click the provided "close" button. That doesn't stop it restarting (or stopping or stopping, whichever you requested) but instead just says you don't need to see that progress bar indicate when the action is completed. If you do "close" it, you can keep an eye on the status of the action within the Services panel to see when the service changes from "restarting" to "started" (or whatever action you requested). You can click f5 or the refresh button in the services panel to refresh the status for all the services.

(Separately, but along the same lines about that fixed timeout for the progress bar, note that while the duration is configurable via a registry tweak, another tip is that if you notice restarts are taking a long time, it's wise to do a separate stop and start instead. That way, the duration allowed can be allocated separately to first the stop and then the start action, rather than trying to get both done in the one provided duration (as a restart does).

Second, note that you can also restart IIS within the IIS admin, rather than Services (in IIS 6, you right-click the server and choose all tasks>restart IIS. In IIS 7, you select the server and choose restart from the "Actions" area on the right.) If one does that in IIS 6, you'll also notice that in fact you're shown a different progress bar, which can last 250 seconds. That is offered to let each site/app pool stop, but note that it offers an option to "force a restart now" which lets you override that and stop more immediately. Perhaps when you try to stop it as a service, it's doing that same graceful shutdown which takes time.

Hope that's helpful.

/charlie arehart

charlie@carehart.org

Providing CF and CFBuilder troubleshooting services

at http://www.carehart.org/consulting