Disclaimer: I’m just an end-user of the ColdFusion product and it is about passing on my experience with upgrading to ColdFusion 2018. The applications we use it will run fast and on the whole maintenance-free. We don’t have access to the source code but I have completed an undergraduate course in ColdFusion and I found it OK.
I recently had to update our ColdFusion system. We had bought an upgraded version for our server but due to other pressing issues, we delayed in installing the system. We have upgraded the system but I would like to point out the issues I found.
Preparing the Windows Server 2019 (installing the roles) for ColdFusion 2018
With the help of our support consultant, we installed the Windows Server 2019 roles to reduce problems with the install of ColdFusion.

Preparing the Windows Server 2019 (installing the features) for ColdFusion 2018
The Features also had to be installed…we use SNMP for our monitoring software. There are two images below to cover the list…


ColdFusion 2018 Installation
The installation process appeared to worked fine (I just went with the defaults and we used our IIS server on the Windows Server 2019) but there is no automatic patching to the current level during the install. You can tick a box to check for updates when you access the admin pages post install.
Our developer found that the earlier version of ColdFusion used a Veritas search engine but the 2018 version uses Solr so he had to make some changes to his code.
ColdFusion 2018 Patching/updating
This is the bummer part… patching. The install was upto update 2 so when you go to the admin console and look to see which patches to install you get the display below:

The issue is that I couldn’t get to the download and install button. I tried chrome, edge and IE. The only solution I could find was to manually install the updates to update 6.
I found unless I ran it as an admin it didn’t install cleanly.
hotfix-003 is update 3,hotfix-004 is update 4 etc..
Using a PowerShell I changed to the directory with the renamed hotfix files and I ran the following commands:
Problems at update 7



Running in Production
All seemed to be good until we switched the DNS servers to point to the new server. With the support of the application developer I made two changes to get the server to work, altering the bindings and adding a virtual directory. I think the binding probably was the issue it we had to get the system running.
Site Bindings
I checked each site binding to ensure it had the IP address of the ColdFusion server.
Virtual Directory
I added a virtual director ‘/jakarta’ to each site.
Up and running
It would seem after these changes the system was running without any issues until the next day when we had issues with mime types (see part 2)