I found an interesting discussion between the community and Adobe today regarding early cfscript functionality for tags. They use CFCs (query.cfc, ldap.cfc, http.cfc, etc.) located in the ColdFusion installation directory. I found this interesting as I never put together that the early introduction of cfscript functionality using “cf…()” was a custom tag. See the screenshot below. These do not correspond with “modern” cfscript such as “httpservice = new http();”. “cfhttp();” is a custom tag, however. The discussion surrounded Adobe’s position/long-term plan for these CFC’s. If you look at Cold ..read more

Server logs in ColdFusion are a must-have resource to help you tune, monitor, and troubleshoot your servers. But what happens when there is too much information? By default, the maximum file size is 5MB. Once it hits that size, it rolls into an archive file, appending a number to the filename. By default, up to 10 archives are stored before they are deleted upon the next archive. Based upon observations on ColdFusion 2021, the size limitation is ignored for “coldfusion-out” and “coldfusion-error” rolling over into archives around 20MB. Example of coldfusion-out.log directory listing and its ar ..read more

I have recently replaced an older Cisco ASA 5550 with a FortiGate 80F. Firewalls are not exactly in my guru status, so I do bring in a networking consultant company to help with these types of things. They are actually the ones the recommended the FortiGate 80F. However, they are quite busy, so it’s up to me to learn the systems and troubleshoot much of it, especially when it falls out of the FortiGate brand. For years, the Cisco ASA 5550 had an IPSec Tunnel that worked flawlessly with the Unifi Security Gateway Pro 4 (USG-PRO-4). But the Cisco did not work well for more modern firewalls with ..read more

The usual person in the tech industry will inevitably have a storage medium you “must” secure before letting it out of your possession. This could mean something as simple as a personal drive with financial records, personal projects, and embarrassing photos that made their way to Facebook anyway. First, these opinions are my own, and I am not a data destruction expert. Take this as you will, but do your due diligence for your needs or wants. Do not use my advice if you are representing the government, a financial service, a publicly held company, or a health care organization. There are legal ..read more

Mura CMS was a popular open-source content management system (CMS) written in ColdFusion. While initially an open-source project maintained by blueriver.com, it was re-licensed as a closed-source cloud application with the release of Mura CMS v10 in 2020. There are forked open-source projects based on the last open-source release of Mura CMS 7.1, including Masa CMS – which is currently maintained at v7.4. Mura CMS 7.x and Masa CMS versions v7.4.0-beta and earlier contain an authentication bypass vulnerability allowing an unauthenticated attacker to log in as any site member or system user. The ..read more

Perform the following at your own risk. Microsoft does not support this program, which is maintained by an individual I do not know personally nor know their reputation well. It is recommended to perform this cleanup only after a clean install. Using this after customizing or installing programs may end with undesired consequnces, such as missing required programs. As an example, QuickBooks requires XPS for PDF utilities (which can not be fixed with Intuit's fix tool automatically). It is highly recommended to take a snapshot or backup before proceeding. My job and home life do not require ..read more

Are you in the market or considering purchasing Adobe ColdFusion’s full or upgrade license? While you always have the option of going straight to Adobe, I recommend purchasing through a reseller. You will typically see a 5% discount and up to 25% depending on the sale. Do you need help with installation, upgrades, or troubleshooting? Contact me at CF Webtools to hire ColdFusion experts and get where you are going. I will be happy to discuss your situation and give you advice up-front. Integral Integral is a great business headquartered in Germany and has regional offices in the UK and the USA ..read more

CF Webtools has maintained VMWare ESXi guest OS instances, managed by vCenter, for about 7 years. They are a mix of Linux and Windows Server OSs and are maintained at a secure and redundant co-location data center. While an expensive up-front investment, it has paid for itself over those years, and we have a plan to continue that solution for about another 5 years. A recent upgrade to the next major version proved that virtual machines take a fraction of time for maintenance compared to bare metal instances. Granted, there’s some spin-up time when things work for so long, and you must remember ..read more

I have recently taken the opportunity to explore Wiki.js as a replacement for a MediaWiki system. Wiki.js Docs Example You can add authentication strategies from sources such as Auth0, Azure AD, Facebook, GitHub, Google, LDAP / Active Directory, OAuth2, Slack, and a number more. The current network has a Domain Controller with an Active Directory, so I wanted to integrate that. The first thing that came to light was that Active Directory (AD) will talk in LDAP on port 389 and LDAPS (secure) on port 636 natively. Sounds great! However, not being an LDAP or Active Directory expert and a lack of ..read more

I took the dive into Docker Containers on Linux. I’ve been meaning to do this for quite some time, but really my specialty of ColdFusion and Microsoft SQL Server really doesn’t require much in the way of containers. However, my current project is to convert our internal wiki from WikiPedia to Wiki.js. During this process, I’ve learned about Docker and Docker Compose. I’m currently running Docker 20.10.12 and Docker compose V2. So I use “docker compose” rather than “docker-compose”. This is being run on Amazon Linux 2, on-premise. These steps should work for any RHEL-based Linux distro and beyo ..read more