Chris 5:10 pm on January 20, 2015
Tags: , J2EE, Session Variables, tomcat   

ColdFusion 11 Will Not Start After Enabling J2EE Session Variables

Update 1/20/2015: Fix is available in the refreshed Full installers. More information on this is available here at:
http://blogs.coldfusion.com/post.cfm/coldfusion-11-installers-refreshed-has-fix-for-server-fails-to-start-on-enabling-j2ee-session-variables-and-installation-on-japanese-os

After some wicked process of elimination at CF Webtools I found out that I was unable to start/restart ColdFusion 11 after enabling J2EE Session Variables in the ColdFusion Administrator.

I went through almost all types of installs thinking it was an issue with the Amazon EC2 server it was on. Thinking this because we have CF11 servers running with J2EE enabled already.

The difference, and the the issue it turns out, is the updated installer that includes update 3 for Windows x64. The original installer doesn’t seem to have this issue.

The underlying issue is whether or not Tomcat persistent sessions were turned on or off. This apparently keeps a session alive during a restart. ColdFusion apparently doesn’t like this if it’s on.

To turn off Tomcat persistent sessions (this seems a little backwards though):

  1. Open {cf instance}/runtime/conf/context.xml
  2. Uncomment <Manager pathname=”” />
  3. Save file and close
  4. Start ColdFusion

This seems to have been an issue on ColdFusion 10 that somehow made its way back to 11.

Thanks to Derrick Anderson with BigTeams for finding this old issue at we3geeks.

I have opened bug ticket 3923565 with Adobe.

#coldfusion-2, #j2ee, #session-variables, #tomcat