CF2018 Standard on IIS 10 (Windows Server 2016) only first call to a .cfm works

[cri@bsd.uchicago.edu]

We are running CF2018 Standard update 7 on IIS 10 (Windows Server 2016) and are seeing very unusual behavior.  Only the first call to a .cfm page returns valid HTML.  Each subsequent call returns a blank page and inspecting source shows an empty file.  If I stop the IIS application pool and restart it, IIS no longer responds at all, either for .cfm or static html pages.  If I completely reboot to get a clean slate, I again can get a response from the first .cfm page I visit and then everything hangs.

Has anyone encountered such a scenario?  Any thoughts on where to look for information on debugging this?

Thanks,

Brian

[EddieLotter]

One of the first places to look are the logs.

[Charlie Arehart]

I've seen a lot in my years troubleshooting such problems, but I've not seen one that sounded like that.

Given what you say, I would ask first if you updated the web server connector after applying the CF updates (up to 7) you did. That's not done for you. More in my post here.

Also, I would make sure there was no problem in DOING those CF updates. For more on troubleshooting that, see my post here.

Let's see how things go with that before proceeding.

[cri@bsd.uchicago.edu]

Thank you for the reply Charlie.

I had not previously upgraded the connector.  I just followed your post to do so, received a message indicating this succeeded, and rebooted the server after that.  After all of this, I am still seeing the behavior described.

I also followed your post about the CF updates and can report that there were no errors.

One thing I didn't mention in the original post is that this is a fresh install on a new OS.  We are side-by-side migrating an app from a Windows Server 2008 R2 running CF 10 to a Windows Server 2016 running CF 2018.  The application uses shibboleth for authentication.  I was seeing the described behavior before applying update 7 and am seeing the same now after.

I have checked the logs for both CF and IIS and there is not much illuminating in those.  

Any additional thoughts you have would be greatly appreciated.

[Dave Watts]

This is almost certainly related to the Shibboleth authentication that you're using. I haven't worked with that for a while, but it was a giant pain to set up correctly at the time. One issue, if I recall correctly, was the execution order of the two DLLs used, one by Shibboleth and one by the CF connector. Maybe the information here will help you:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/coldfusion/coldfusion-11-update-14-breaks-shibboleth/td-p/9870771?pag...

Dave Watts, Eidolon LLC