I had the opportunity to upgrade not one, not two, but 5 ColdFusion boxes we own in ColdFusion (dev and production). Most of the installs were great and without any major issues, but there were a couple of the installs I had some issues with. Read below to see what those were and hopefully this blog entry will prevent you from having the same issues (or at least, you will know what they are and hot to fix them).

Issues I had:

1. Make sure you check “documentation” if you want ODBC drivers installed, otherwise, it won’t install it. ODBC services are stored under c:\coldfusion8\db\slserver54\bin. If that directory is empty (or the bin directory does not exists), then it did not install.
   
2. Sometimes the Verity search engine won’t install correctly. If you go into the admin screen (under data & services –>Verity Collections) and you get an error such as “Can’t read collections…Verity may not be started or installed”, try to uninstall Verity and reinstall it. You can do it this way:
   • Go to your ColdFusion Directory on the hard drive (e.g. C:\ColdFusion8\verity)
   • Locate the file “verity-uninstall.bat” and run it. Let it finish completely (it will close the DOS propmt automatically)
   • Locate the file “verity-install.bat” and runit. Let it finish completely (it will close the DOS prompt automatically).
   • Verify that your Verity service is now running and then log back in and check in the admin. It should now be ok.
3. On one install, the index.cfm default document in IIS was removed after I installed CF8. I had to re-enter that in IIS.

Tips

1. Change all services to log in as an account instead of as a service. That way, ColdFusion can have access to other servers that account in that machine has access to. For example, if you want to get a file from a different machine on your network, ColdFusion has to have access to that other machine via user name and password that can access that other machine. The only way it has access to that other machine is if ColdFusion is logged in as a real account and not a system account. However, that real account has to have access to the machine you want ColdFusion to access.

I will post more tips and issues as I get the chance!

Cheers!

- Marcelo
The Digital Media Dude