Error running wsconfig after CF2018 Update 8

[jarviswabi]

I have 4 seemingly identical servers running Windows Server 2019 and ColdFusion 2018 (on IIS10).  I recently ran through the drill of applying the latest CF updates, starting with Update 4 and then Update 10 (which was cumulative).  On three of the servers, this went fine - after Update 10, I had to run wsconfig and "Upgrade" my connector for IIS, and everything ran fine after that.  But on one server, when I go to run wsconfig after Update 10, I get an error in the DOS-style window that starts with "java.io.IOException: Cannot run program "ExecuteAppCmd.exe": CreateProcess error=2, The system cannot find the file specified", and then a long java trace, and the wsconfig dialog does not list my connector (even though it's there and running).  And if I try to "Add", I get a message saying "All the IIS sites are already configured by some other version of ColdFusion".

The first time through, I ended up recreating my site in IIS and reinstalling CF2018 to restore my instance to usability, which was far too disruptive for a production environment.  The next time I attempted the updates, I'd discovered how to uninstall each one, so I again installed Update 4 and then tried Update 10.  After hitting this wall again, I uninstalled Update 10 (from this one problematic server) and then applied Updates 5 through 7 sequentially (no issues), then Update 8, and that produced the same problem.  I understand the requirement to update the connector comes from Update 8 (and is included in 10), so no surprise there.  I removed Update 8 and Update 7 is running fine.  But I still get that error when I try to run wsconfig.  Also very odd - I get the same error when I run wsconfig on one of the other servers where Update 10 (and the Upgrade) were successful, but not on the other two.  And in all cases, the IIS connector is definitely configured and working, and I've compared the wsconfig directories and see no differences.

So the challenge is - how to make wsconfig work properly so I have confidence in retrying Updates 8-10.  I found some articles talking about that ExecuteAppCmd having the wrong bitness, but that's not the error I got, and those articles are from CF11 6 years ago and the solution isn't relevant anymore.

Has anybody seen this issue, or have any insight into how to get wsconfig working?  I did look for the ExecuteAppCmd.exe file, and it doesn't exist on the server throwing that error, but does exist in a local temp folder on the ones where it does work.  I don't see any obvious differences in the installed programs on the two servers - both have the three most recent Microsoft C++ redistributables in both x86 and x64.  I need to make sure I have access to wsconfig for upgrading the connectors before I attempt Updates 8-10 again, or know how to manually add the secret to the connector.

[jarviswabi]

I may have found a possible manual workaround.  I did a little more comparing of files, and I noticed that the {cf_root}\config\wsconfig\1\workers.properties file on my servers running Update 10 have an additional line not present on the one problematic one, the line containing the worker.cfusion.secret.  As I understand it, this is what the connector upgrade is supposed to enable.  I found that same secret key in the {cf_root}\cfusion\runtime\conf\server.xml file on the upgraded servers.  Assuming that gets created as part of the Update, maybe manually adding that line to the workers.properties file and restarting IIS and CF would be the manual way to upgrade the connector?  It still would be nice to be able to run wsconfig again for future possible reasons, but if this gets the Update applied, maybe that's sufficient?

[BKBK]

Indeed. Make sure that, for the instance in question, the secret in workers.properties is the same as the secret in server.xml. You could then manually upgrade the connector using the Web Server Configuration Tool (wsconfig).