Why CF10 is the worst version ever to install

Question

Hi All
I'd thought id share some of the pain ive been having with installing CF10. We have a pretty big install environment and during our CF10 migration project we have had to install
- a dev VM on CentOS
- 3 UAT boxes on Solaris 10 (Sparc)
- 4 staging/Prod boxes on Solaris 10 (Sparc)
all up that's 8 installs of CF10 and almost 20 instances of CF across all the applications. I have to say I'm really disappointed. This is the first big update ive done on Unix, in the past ColdFusion v4-v9 I have worked on Windows servers.
Some of my main greifs have included this time around:
- You must apply the mandatory update after you install
http://helpx.adobe.com/coldfusion/kb/coldfusion-10-mandatory-update.html
- you then must update to the latest patch - update 11. Except on Solaris I have found it wont do work via CFIDE. You have to use the command line. (CFIDE is broken)
- CFIDE is horribly broken, we cannot use the 'settings' page at all. Everything must be edited via neo-*.xml files
http://helpx.adobe.com/coldfusion/kb/coldfusion-administrator-fails-permission-denied.html
https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3536062
- wsconfig doesn't deal with multiple sites and multiple instances very well and you have to do everything manually. Including extracting the connector from WSConfig.jar
http://rob.brooks-bilson.com/index.cfm/2012/2/23/Configuring-Multiple-Instances-of-ColdFus ion-10-with-Apache-Virtual-Hosts
http://helpx.adobe.com/coldfusion/kb/coldfusion10-apache-manual-connector-configuration.ht ml
- Solr/jetty Init Script is broken
http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1009951
- the installer on Unix doesn't install it so that the service auto-starts, you have to do that yourself.
- the Init script doesnt deal with multiple instances or give you a PID so you know how to kill it if it wont stop gracefully, which is happening alot!, we ended up writing our own init.d script.
IMO the next version of CF needs more work on the installer annd CFIDE side of things. It is way too hard to install.

Answer 1

I hear your pain, Pat, but since I help people solve problems like this daily (and they are not always what they seem), I want to share a few thoughts in reply. I realize it may only smack of me being a CF apologist. It comes from sincere motivations and experience in trying simply to help people.
The mandatory update is required because the Adobe-wide server certificate was compromised weeks after CF9 came out. They (the CF team) did not rebuild the installer but offered this “mandatory update” instead. Sure, they could have done a new installer, and some may assert they should have, but that’s a big effort considering how many platforms they support (both OS’s, web servers, databases, their versions, and combinations thereof.)
Same with the need to apply updates upon installation. This is nothing new at all for CF10, but was the same for previous releases, for the same reasons as above.
As for “the CFIDE” being “horribly broken”, I assume you mean the CF Administrator (one of several things provided within the CFIDE folder). As for any page not working, my first suspicious in a case like that is that perhaps the problem is not “in CF” but rather with your configuration. This is just a guess, but an educated one: could it be that you have CF10 trying to run against a CF9 or earlier version of the CFIDE folder? I see it quite often, and not intentional or expected by folks, of course. First, did you happen to have CF 9 or earlier installed on the machine? Or even if not, did you perhaps bring onto this “new machine” a web site docroot that included a CFIDE folder? Or what about your Apache conf file (since you are on Linux). Might it still have alias’s defined pointing to a CFIDE from before?
In CF10, the CFIDE is always stored in the (cf10)\cfusion\wwwroot, or (cf10)(instancename)\wwwroot, if you create a new instance.  The thing is, if somehow you either already have a CFIDE in the docroot for one or more of your web sites, or if there is an alias (or virtual directory, for those readers using IIS) that points to another one besides that stored in the CF10 wwwroot, that could cause the problems you are seeing.
As for the wsconfig, you refer to multiple sites and instances. It should handle multiple sites no problem, and no differently than previous releases. As for multiple instances, there is a difference in CF10. Whereas the previous wsconfig would let you install any site into any of your available instances, the CF10 one for some reason does require that you launch it from within the instance you want to configure a connection to. It does not find and list all instances, if run for the main cfusion instance’s folder. That is indeed confusing to many. (So don’t get me wrong: I’m by no means suggesting that CF10 is perfect. Just that things are often not quite as they seem to some.)
The concern reported about the Jetty/Solr service sounds legit, per that forum entry, but I do note it’s from 2012. Are you sure it’s not something that’s been resolved by an update? You don’t mention if you did apply them, but I’ll assume you did. Did you notice if there were any changes in your problems with the Jetty service after that? And perhaps also the autostart issue?
As for your finding that CF often “won’t stop gracefully”, what do the coldfusion-out.log or (in linux, cfserver.log) tell you in the entries around the time of your attempting to stop CF? There could be (and usually are) clues.
Finally, if you may mean that CF (or the Apache connector) seems to be “crashing a lot”, did you catch the indication in the readme for the update (both update 11, and earlier ones) that states that after applying the update, you may (and generally must) rebuild or at least update the web server connector? Sometimes the updates include a fix to the connector (mod_jk.so for Apache, isapi_redirect.dll for IIS)? If that file (in each folder under (cf10)\config\wsconfig) is still dated March 2012, then you have not updated it and can expect serious problems under even moderate load.
Hope all that’s helpful. Again, not trying to entirely negate your assertion of CF10 having issues. I just think the “worst ever” seems a bit over the top. I understand how you may feel that, but I hope I’ve offered some hope that there may be explanations for things, and that they may help you get off on a better foot if you go forward.
All that said, there is certainly room for improvement in any subsequent release, with respect to the installer, the web server config tool, and other things that you’ve touched on. Let’s hope that Adobe will consider them.
/charlie