"The connection was reset" errors ColdFusion 10

Very interesting ideas “you have”.  (That quoted part is a reference to the author’s use of “chickity china” as his forum name, for the sake of anyone who’s heard the classic audio clip of a phone prank. )

This will be great if it does indeed solve things for most folks. For those who may not just want to add the XML but understand what it’s doing, I’ve added some commentary here. I’d appreciate if the author would offer his concurrence that I get it right So basically you’re proposing 3 changes in IIS 7+ with regard to how 404 errors are handled.

And for the benefit of future readers, I’d like to add that you (I so wish people identified themselves) are showing it via XML changes, though one could also do them in the interface. In case someone may either be forced to make changes only in the interface, or they want to better understand what he’s proposing below, here’s how it seems (and I have confirmed by making the changes in the interface and confirmed that it ends up creating the same XML).

At a high level, he (?) is changing controls in what would be the “error pages” feature and then the “URL rewrite” feature. (And he starts out showing how to download the URL rewrite feature for IIS, but some may find that it's already installed, or can be added as a role/service. I can't recall which versions have it built-in.)

And he’s also mentioned making the XML changes in the web.config, which is supposing that the change be done for a given site, but readers should know that they could also be done at either the site or server level in the IIS interface using the “Error pages” and “URL Rewrite” features. (It can also be done at the server level in XML but by changing instead the applicationhost.config file. I will not elaborate here on doing that, but will show how to do it in the interface.)

So first, as for the error pages feature, he is doing the equivalent of removing the 404 handler from IIS for the given site, and he is changing the “edit feature settings” for “error pages” to change to “detailed”, for local AND remote requests. That latter point is very important. (That, too, is a subject worth further discussion, but now’s not a good time for me to elaborate.)

Finally, he’s adding a pair of “url rewrite” rules to handle 404’s differently (for http and https). For each rule, it will be a "blank rule" and an "inbound" one. You can see the values (in his XML) that you’d want to put in (if doing it in the interface) for the rule’s name, pattern, and added conditions (and their “input” and “pattern” values). And the “negate=yes” he shows means it’s a “does not match this pattern” check.

Further, logically, the conditions are saying “don’t run the rule if the requested file is the cffileservlet itself or any pattern starting with it, and don’t match if the requested file name is a file or folder name.” I suppose the latter is to simulate a 404 (the file requested name does not exist as a file or folder) and the former (about cffileservlet) is to help solve whatever has been perhaps the real crux of the problem. Can the author confirm? The last condition is about SSL vs not, and note that he creates 2 rules, one for HTTP and one for HTTPS.

As for how well this may solve the 404 handling problem people have had, I can’t confirm right now. I’ve not got the problem myself, but I have a few clients who do and I will point them to this to see if they confirm it solves the problem for them.

Hope that’s helpful for some readers. And thanks again to the writer, if indeed this solves the problem for folks. (Adobe has mentioned in the bug report about this, #3488063, that they are working on a new connector. It may be that after that fix is applied in the future, one would not need the special handling outlined here. I hope anyone working on that in the future will add further comment/confirmation.)

/charlie

Message was edited by: Charlie Arehart I added comment on how the first download link refers to adding the URLRewrite tool, and how some may find that already installed.

Message was edited by: Charlie Arehart Also edited the comment to indicate that when adding rules in the interface, you would choose to create a "blank rule" and an "inbound" one.

I can concur I know of a user hitting this, who has also applied Updater 5 and confirmed it’s installed, as well as the web connector reconfigured and updated, and gets the same problem with 404’s. We’ve noticed as well that the failure rate depends on the browser: Chrome got about 90%, FF got about 20%, but it would always fail at least a couple times in 10 test requests, so that’s not a theoretical 20% but actual.

If it may help anyone from Adobe to study this, we also observed that with Chrome the error detail was “err_incomplete_chunked_encoding”, and further with the Chrome Dev tools we could see in the headers that the response header (from CF/IIS) indicated it receiving a header of:

transfer-encoding="chunked"

I didn’t get to notice if that was typical of all requests, or only of those responded to when an IIS 404 handler was passing the requests to CF, or if perhaps only on failing requests for such. Maybe someone else with this problem will be able to confirm either way.

/charlie

One more comment. First, perhaps I should have given the link to that technote: http://helpx.adobe.com/coldfusion/kb/coldfusion-10-update-3.html

Second, I should note that it's understandable that we (those of us applying the Updater) through the CF Admin auto-hotfix mechanism might not be compelled to read the technote about an updater. An argument could certainly be made (and has been made by some) that this should be either clarified or even offered during the updater. See comments in the blog entry on the updater, specifically:

http://blogs.coldfusion.com/post.cfm/coldfusion-10-update-3-released#comment-1C003E9C-E5AF-951A-3227D4A3666A9C4A

and
http://blogs.coldfusion.com/post.cfm/coldfusion-10-update-3-released#comment-31617920-A952-3037-544E3E5BECB55096

Third, i just noticed that the technote talks about doing the web server config tool from the command line (which is indeed always another option). But in that case, my observation about being sure to "run as admin" still applies: this time, when you open the command prompt. Use Start>Accessories and then right-click on "Command Prompt" to "run as admin".

I do so wish that any Adobe references to these matters did make that point more clear.    

Carl,

I will update ColdFusion now and report you if the issues are not resolved.

Thanks!

________

Well i get:

"Error occurred while installing the update:

Failed Signature verification"

Any advise?

Thanks!