Just tried to install multiple Cold Fusion 2023 instances programmatically by a coldfusion script and the setup failed after a few seconds with the following error message:

I received a hotfix for "serverinstance.cfc" from Adobe Support.

• 21.07.2023: Hotfix is available via support. Should be fixed in Updater 5+
• 11.07.2023: Opened case with support "CF2023: "The rootdir method was not found" when creating multiple instances".

Not much has changed since ColdFusion 10: How to configure data sources with Microsoft JDBC Driver 4.0 for SQL Server, but a small detail is now required to connect to your existing MsSQL Servers.

This article explains how you are able to use the Microsoft JDBC Driver for SQL Server under ColdFusion. The background why you should do this is the bug Macromedia database drivers leaking memory. This is a very serious bug as you can see in the linked article. Your servers will be very unstable if you run with the Adobe build in drivers for Microsoft SQL. Until today we have not found any single issue at all with the replaced drivers. It is really a drop in replacement without any side effect.

You may heard about self service password reset (SSRP) in Microsoft Azure cloud. A nice feature where your users can reset thier password and unlock their accounts on their own. But if you are implementing it and wonder if you get errors you may get stuck and wonder what the hell is going one with Azure AD Connect software. The AD connect has all permissions it need. Maybe setup has done something wrong or the powershell permission scripts are doing something wrong and not setting the required permissions properly in AD or whaterver... reading all the documented 3 times and you see nothing is wrong. MS Support beginners are also not helpful and may tell you incorrect stuff like granting domain admin permission to AD Connect service and so on and so on.

What happened? We tried to change the users password of a dummy user we typically use for testing purposes. The password change was tried with this dummy user and he received an generic error message that the password cannot changed for unknown reasons and the user should not try again and ask the administrator. The administrator reviews the logs and can see:

If you shutdown a VM and you cannot restart it again this might be caused by Read Only Domain Controller (RODC).

If you may seen an error message that a VM cannot start with error code 0x80070569 check if the site the VM is running on has an RODC only. If this is the case you may missed to add the new VM to the "Allowed RODC Password Replication Group" of this site. The error 0x80070569 point to a Logon Failure per https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-server/virtualization/starting-or-live-migrating-hyper-v-vms-fails.

Search on the Hyper-V host for System Eventlog for ID 5723 and you may see the VM machine name is not trusted by the local RODC server. Also search Hyper-V-VMMS > Admin eventlogs for event ID 15500 to find error code 0x80070569.

Now add the VM machine name into your "Allowed RODC Password Replication Group" and reboot the RODC and VM. When it comes up again the machine account will be cached locally on RODC and you can start/stop the virtual machine successfully.

This is a note for all others searching for a Azure Data Studio version that can be deployed in Enterprise via Active Directory. I've created a full-fledged per machine and per user MSI setup for the Azure Data Studio-Team (see case 4126) to make Azure Data Studio deployable via Active Directory. If you'd like to push it out to your users desktops - it exists now. No need to wrap suxxx InnoSetup EXE installer into an MSI any longer.

Please do understand this setup as PREVIEW as it should be automatically build by Azure Data Studio project. Until a version exists that can disable automatic updates (optionally) I do not name this FINAL. The installer defaults to per machine installations and should also install per user in roaming app data folder as recommended. Automatic updates should intentionally fail as inno_updater has been dropped.

This is a note for all others searching for a VSCode or VSCodium version that can be deployed in Enterprise via Active Directory. I've created a full-fledged per machine and per user MSI setup for the VSCodium Team (see case 106) to make VSCodium / VSCode deployable via Active Directory. If you'd like to push it out to your users desktops - it's available now. No need to wrap suxxx InnoSetup EXE installer into an MSI any longer. All my hate goes to ignorant VSCode project maintainers like joaomoreno who think they do not need to support MSI (see case 33184). Maybe he has a manager who can force him to implement standard Microsoft setups that simply must exists.

Please do understand this setup as PREVIEW as it should be automatically build by vscodium project. The installer defaults to per machine installations and should also install per user in roaming app data folder as recommended.

You may like to install WinCache Extension for PHP, but you always get a message "PHPPATH property must be set to the directory where PHP resides.". You cannot set this variable as environment variable. You need to provide it to the MSI file as variable. Additionally they integrated another license nag screen that will be skipped with IACCEPTWINDOWSCACHEFORPHPLICENSETERMS. Make sure the path to PHP has always a trailing slash or the php_wincache.dll is not installed to your PHP\ext folder, but somewhere else!

The complete command is:

msiexec /i wincachewpi-2.0.0.8-7.3-nts-vc15-x64\wincache73x64wpi.msi PHPPATH=C:\PHP\ IACCEPTWINDOWSCACHEFORPHPLICENSETERMS="Yes" /q

• 12.07.2019 Created documentation.

Since Oracle has decided to charge enterprise customers with upcomming JDK11 and JRE11 people need to look for alternatives. There is OpenJDK around that can close the gap.

As you may expierienced in past - Oracle has changed the MSI files embedded into their EXE setups in version 8.x a few times and cleaned up their installer a lot. At first thought it was a WTF are they doing there in the middle of 8.x, but on the end it became clear that they cleaned up the 8.x installer only. It was an outgrown mess over the years and full of garbage. However - they broke the ability to deploy it easily. Now after the setup cleanup a lot of knowledge and guessing is required to fix the MSI database and make it installable via AD GPOs. It is clear that they like to sell the customer only enterprise MSI installer that nobody want to pay $ 100K for. With Java 9 they started to hide the MSI file more. The MSI files are no longer extracted to TEMP folder if you run the EXE setup. But it is still an MSI and this goes into C:\Windows\Installer folder. You can still make a snapshot of a virtual machine, install Java and grab the MSI from the Installer folder.

Now with Java 11 and later Oracle plans to release a new major Java version every ~6 months and force all end users to upgrade to the latest version. Java version 8.x is no longer supported after in January 2019 without a payed LTS contract. Long term versions are than only available to enterprise customers. Additionally enterprise users always need to license their servers and client computers running Java. They are no longer allowed to use the end user Java versions. End users are not affected by this change.

A few days ago I found out that the previouly hidden link used to download Skype as MSI setup is broken. The last available version was Skype 7.41.101. The latest 8.x versions (8.28.0.41) seem no longer available as official MSI package. This means enterprise deployment is made impossible as EXE setups cannot deployed via Active Directory GPO deployment. Originally when Skype 8.0 was released it was planed to discontinue the Skype 7 ("Skype Classic") support per 1^th September 2018, but they extended the deadline to 1^th November 2018, until some customer requested features are added back to 8.x. It is not clear if these missing features also include the MSI setup. The learning curve that customers cannot ignored seems not very strong; if we keep the past mobile client fiasco in mind.

Contacted Skype support and they confirmed that MSI setup is not available and they named it no longer supported. They pointed to other solutions like Skype for Business and noted that this team may know where the required MSI is, but they cannot help if it comes to end user Skype.

We need to make sure the meetings can take place. Being surprised in weeks or months by a no longer working Skype client is not really an option. A solution is required as there was news around from a Skype employee named Babs that stated the old Skype Classic 7.x will still work for now, but may break in near future. The current deadline for 7.x is 1th November 2018. You need to install 8.x before this date.

You may have seen that SQL Server Management Studio 2017 automatically bubbles and asks for updates. But your users do not have permission to install updates and you maintain updates via WSUS. SQL Server Management Studio 17.x is available via WSUS.

Microsoft has for unknown reasons moved this setting into HKEY_CURRENT_USER. How stupid is this... Software is deployed per machine and not per user. Software is only deployed by idiots per user.

Now you have two options:

1. Walk to every users and uncheck the Tools > Check for Updates > Automatically check for updates for SQL Server Management Studio setting. Not really an enterprise solution.