Thursday 14 November 2013

Weirdness with installing ColdFusion 10 update 12

G'day:
A coupla days back update 12 came out for ColdFusion 10: "ColdFusion Help / ColdFusion 10 Update 12". I had some installation "challenges" with it, and have now heard of two other people with the same experience.



A coupla days ago, Dale Fraser followed up a Twitter message I made a while ago, contradicting what I had said:


I'm always one to rise to this sort of bait, because before I say something, I like to be fairly certain of it, so test whatever it is before I make my claim. That said, occasionally I mess up, so I wanted to revisit this to see if I was mistaken (or, as I suspected, Dale was).

So I blew my ColdFusion 10 install away, re-downloaded the installer from Adobe (verifying that the file was identical to the one I used last time, before making my Twitter-based claim), and reinstalled.

Having completed the install, CFAdmin was claiming the version was "10,283922". This is an odd version number, because:
  1. CF version numbers are usually formed a,b,c,d, where a is the major version, b,c is the minor version, and d is the build number.
  2. 283922 falls halfway between ColdFusion 10 (update 7): 10,0,7,283649; and ColdFusion 10 (update 8): 10,0,8,284032 (ref: "Adobe ColdFusion" (Wikipedia). Disclosure: I maintain that list of version numbers, but it's based on what CF reports after each update).
Still:  283922 is higher than what the guidance says one should worry about regarding the mandatory update:

If the version of your ColdFusion 10 installation is 282462, ensure that you have applied the mandatory update
available at http://www.adobe.com/support/coldfusion/downloads_updates.html before applying this update.
(that's from the info screen for Update 12 in CFAdmin).

So... it would suggest that the baseline install of ColdFusion ships with the mandatory updater, based on on-screen info.

Accordingly I tried to install Update 12, and after it downloaded but before it installed, I got an error "Failed Signature verification", which is indicative of the mandatory updater not being installed.

Harrumph.

That said, I remembered last time I did an update, I manually worked my way through each outstanding update, rather than just doing the most current one. Now one should be able to just perform the most current update as they're cumulative, but I figured that was a difference between last time and this time, so I'd try last time's approach. If it was a case of not having the mandatory updater installed already as Dale suggested (although I really doubted this now), I'd not be able to install Update 8 (the oldest update not shipped with this ColdFusion install) either.

I opted to install Update 8, and it went smoothly. Meaning the mandatory updater is installed. Otherwise the "Failed Signature verification" error. And I then tried to go straight to Update 12 again, and this time it worked fine.

Dale subsequently verified this was along the lines of his own experiences, too.

On Twitter last night Rex Vincent Aglibot reported the same experience as I had had:

I followed this through a bit with Rex, and it seems his experience was similar to mine, except he tried and succeeded with Update 11 then Update 12, rather than 8 and 12 as I tried.

So I do think there is an issue here.

My conclusion here is twofold:
  1. that the current ColdFusion download does indeed include the mandatory updater. Hemant actually verified this in a comment against a blog article: "New Platform Support for ColdFusion 10 and ColdFusion Builder 2.0.1: Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012", but sometimes what Adobe says and what reality is are two different things, I know this... so I like to check for myself (that said, Hemant's pretty bloody reliable).
  2. There's some sort of glitch with Update 12, in that it won't install on a fresh install of ColdFusion 10.
It's easy to work around, but I think Adobe need to check it out because something's clearly not playing nice here.

Anyway, hopefully this shows up on Google if you try to install update 12 on a fresh ColdFusion 10 install and it fails with "Failed Signature verification", and it'll save you some time working out "WTF?"

--
Adam