Licence reverted to Developer following ColdFusion Application Server service restart

[paul_durrant]

We were having a number of issues with our database connections (turned out to be a database issue) so did a ColdFusion Application Server service restart just in case that helped.

The licence then went back to Developer.

Re-entered the Standard licence key and all is well.

But need to understand why this happened.  Running ColdFusion 2018. Never occurred on our old ColdFusion 10. 

Concerned if it happens out of hours - eg. a server reboot or someone else restarts the service, as this used to be a standard way of getting ColdFusion working it if hangs.

Thanks 

Paul

[BKBK · Accepted solution]

Good question, @paul_durrant . Though you never observed the issue on ColdFusion 10, I can assure you the problem was known in earlier ColdFusion versions. For example, in ColdFusion 8.

One likely cause is known. During restart ColdFusion - for some reason you have to look into - was unable to get access to or read the file /lib/license.properties. As a result, ColdFusion defaulted to the Developer license.

Check your log files. You might find clues there as to what prevented ColdFusion from reading the license file.

[paul_durrant · Accepted solution]

Been OK for the last half year.

Checked ColdFusion application logs, Server logs for reboots and folder access to the licence file. 

Cannot see anything that caused the issue : switched it to Evaluation edition, which then switched to Developer edition 26 days later.

Does not occur on ColdFusion Application restart or server restart.

Note error: client.properties file exists but has zero length occurred before this, and has not occurred since.

In the ColdFusion forum a similar error from 2012 (see the link above) this also reported a similar problem with that file, and had this solution (so maybe it was a glitch in the Java setup?).

So we're just going to remain vigilant and keep an eye on things.