ColdFusion 9 Upgrade - my pitfalls and issues

I had a brief search round the Net for other people's experiences with upgrades from ColdFusion 8 to ColdFusion 9. After a good search I was unable to find any alarming stories. Unlike the Microsoft Vista to Windows 7 upgrade saga which has hit a few major glitches all seemed quiet for CF9. So I proceeded to upgrade my local server as a starting point.

During the upgrade the system will discover your present ColdFusion installation and ask if you wish to import the existing settings. All good so far and I check the box to import the old settings.

In time the installation completes and the process to import the old settings is started and soon completed. To be safe I restart the system and I test various websites now on ColdFusion 9 after the upgrade. All previous settings were reviewed and seemed to be in place on the new service.

Next step. Upgrade the live servers from ColdFusion 8 to ColdFusion 9. Same process is experienced and everything seems to have gone without a hitch.

On the live servers there are a number of scheduled tasks running and additional MS Access DSNs which are not on my local test server. As soon as the live server has been rebooted I once again reviewed the major websites to ensure that all seemed to be running normally. All looked good so I called it a day.

The next morning I had an unusual number of error messages coming in for the scheduled tasks that were running to import news delivered via ftp. The error as it turned out was that cffile was trying to delete a file that no longer existed. The only way the system could delete the file would be to have the name to start with so this was very odd.

My first step was to check the scheduled tasks to ensure they were working properly. All checked out on my local servers. In time, I realised that the system had renamed the file and that is why it could not delete it. It was as if the task was running twice. So I looked at Services on the server and to my surprise ColdFusion 8 was still running alongside ColdFusion 9 with all of the same settings therefore running the task twice. The real question is why is CF8 still running? It turned out to be the same situation on my test server. Oops. I should make a note to make more checks.

To resolve the issue I stopped and disabled all ColdFusion 8 related services and removed all items in the registry with ColdFusion8 mentioned. Once the machine was restarted the scheduled tasks started working properly.

The next and hopefully last issue I had with the ColdFusion upgrade was with the older sites which still used MS Access as a database. When I tried to load these sites it came up with the strangest error... "Page not available at this URL" or something along those lines.

It turns out the database connection was no longer working due to changes in the ODBC drivers for MS Access in CF9. When testing the DSN in ColdFusion Administrator it came up with an error of TCP/IP connection failure. After deleting the old DSNs and creating new ones the two websites in question came back online.

Sadly my upgrade experience did not go nearly as well as I had hoped or as well as the ColdFusion 7 to ColdFusion 8 upgrades I completed around 2 years ago. So much for idea of getting better with age. I hope this does help anyone who is having similar experiences.