Coldfusion 11 serving up .cfm files as download

[nbsmithcolostate]

We started with a working instance of Windows Server 2007 R2 using IIS 7 with Coldfusion 9 Enterprise Edition installed that hosts multiple sites (in fact its still currently running now).  Made an exact copy of it to a new instance.  It worked just as the old one did though we could only run each site through localhost as the old domains have not been transferred over to point to the new server.  We uninstalled Coldfusion 9 Enterprise Edition and then installed Coldfusion 11 Standard Edition.  This is of course where things started going horribly wrong.

Being a new install using the Coldfusion Web Server Configuration we added all the sites. At first just nothing worked.  500.* errors always.

Multiple tries of removing and adding sites through the config manager didn't work, then we noticed that Coldfusion 9 had not properly uninstalled and removed its vestiges from IIS.  AboMapperCustom was still listed in all the site's Handler Mappings.  Force removed that, one more cycle of the Coldfusion config manager and finally coldfusion files seemed (more on that later) to be properly being served up.

We then started to add the datasources.  Pulled up a site (through localhost) that used one of the datasources and got a 500.* error.  Got an end run around looking on the web for solutions, come to find that not even CFIDE/Administrator wasn't working.  More hair pulling later updated Coldfusion 11 to update 7 (was at 3 if I remember correctly).  127.0.0.1/CFIDE/Administrator started working at least.  Removed and added sites through Coldfusion config manager again. Got the general http://localhost/ to work, CFIDE/Administrator does not work (won't accept http verb post, even though its properly configured to do so everywhere we can figure).  Could not find a good solution for that anywhere so as a test we tried navigating on the site to pull up another page and that is when we started getting .cfm served up as downloads.  These files served this way are neither pure text cfm files nor are they html files with improper headers confusing IE.  These have encoded data that a text editor can't read.

http://localhost/ works.

http://localhost/index.cfm forces the weird download of encoded garbage (5KB file turns into 412KB).

http://localhost/guides/ works.

http://localhost/guides/index.cfm does not.

I have seen zero working solutions on the web for this, which is rare.

[nbsmithcolostate · Accepted solution]

Ok, well, yet another one of those times when you find a solution 15 minutes after posting for help.

This web config does not work.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<configuration>

    <system.webServer>

        <tracing>

            <traceFailedRequests>

                <add path="*">

                    <traceAreas>

                        <add provider="WWW Server" areas="Authentication,Security,Filter,StaticFile,CGI,Compression,Cache,RequestNotifications,Module,Rewrite" verbosity="Verbose" />

                    </traceAreas>

                    <failureDefinitions timeTaken="00:00:00" statusCodes="400-500" />

                </add>

            </traceFailedRequests>

        </tracing>

        <handlers accessPolicy="Read, Script">

            <remove name="AboMapperCustom-295785" />

        </handlers>

    </system.webServer>

</configuration>

This web config does.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<configuration>

    <system.webServer>

        <handlers>

            <remove name="AboMapperCustom-295785" />

        </handlers>

    </system.webServer>

</configuration>

Just did some testing and the offending part seems to be this:

<handlers accessPolicy="Read, Script">

Changing that to

<handlers>

seemed to do the trick.

It does seem weird though as originally I used IIS to remove AboMapperCustom from Handler Mappings and the first web config with accessPolicy="Read, Script" in it was the result.  This time I made a backup of the old web config, deleted it, had IIS make a new one, removed AboMapperCustom again through IIS, because it appeared again and broke everything, resulting in the 2nd web config.  Now everything seems to work again.  Even the weird CFIDE/Administator http verb post error we got before.

Leaving this here for other people with this issue.