ColdFusion DevNet Edition - Not for Production Use

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ColdFusion DevNet Edition - Not for Production Use

The Devnet Edition of Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7 Server produces a META tag as a "watermark" in the generated output to indicate that it is not for use in production although it has all the Enterprise features and no IP restrictions. This is useful for allowing a team of developers to work off a central CFMX server in a shop that chooses not to buy an Enterprise or Standard edition license for development/QA. The watermark is generated as the first line of generated output and will appear ~~before any HTML markup~~ in between the HEAD tags when outputting HTML, but its a problem for non-HTML content. If the generated content is, say, XML delivered via CFCONTENT then the XML will have the unclosed META tag as a watermark which breaks the well-formedness of the XML document.

In ColdFusion MX 6.1 this watermark could be avoided by setting the content type with CFCONTENT in pages where the watermark broke the generated content, as blogged here, but in CFMX 7 there is no such workaround.

Since the DevNet edition is meant for development/QA only, you could remove the existing DevNet serial number for the ColdFusion MX 7 installation and it will automatically become the free Developer's Edition which does not produce the watermark but has an IP restriction to localhost and 2 other IP addresses.

Stop ColdFusion MX server
Backup $CFHOME/lib/license.properties
Edit the original $CFHOME/lib/license.properties
Find the line with the serial number, such as "sn=CXX7NN-NNNNN-NNNNN-NNNNNN"
Remove everything on that line after "sn=" (remove the serial number actually)
Save the file
Start ColdFusion server
Check System Information page in CF Admin to confirm that it is Developer Edition

Again, the Developer Edition has full Enterprise features, but it has an IP restriction that DevNet did not. The META tag watermark will no longer appear in the generated content.

In this scenario, a team of developers won't be able to connect to and test with a centralized Developer Edition of ColdFusion MX 7, but they could each install a free copy of the Developer Edition locally on their workstation/laptop and then check the source into a central locatation for testing by one or two individuals. Of course, this may present a hardship for a developer team that chose to not purchase a Standard or Enterprise license for their central dev/QA CFMX 7 server.

posted on 15 June, 2005 at 12:40 PM.
ColdFusion | Comments (23)

Comments

This is pretty bogus. We bought DevNet licenses here, specifically 17 of them at considerable cost so that all of our developers would be free to use centeral servers in addition to their desktop developer versions. This was one of the main selling points of DevNet at the time - the unlimited for development server versions. To "break" this functionality with the watermark in CFMX 7 so that the CFCONTENT workaround no longer works has been a big problem for us as one of our apps is heavily dependant upon this for pushing out file downloads. I was hoping to hear that Macromedia was going to "fix" this in an updater or hotfix.

comment by Rob Brooks-Bilson, posted at 6/15/05 11:32 AM

This has been a topic I chatted with a few folks over this week. I was trying to test a webserervice and could not because it was invalid.

Thanks for the tip.

comment by Simeon, posted at 6/15/05 11:35 AM

Frankly I don't know much about the cost of Devnet. I still receive questions from people who are using a Devnet license locally on their desktop/laptop and just want to get rid of the watermark, and they're usually ok with just switching to the Developer edition. This blog post just attempts to offer that choice, even if its not the best one.

I haven't heard much about what's being done to change or "fix" the watermark, but I'll see if there's any news on the horizon about that.

comment by Steven Erat, posted at 6/15/05 11:44 AM

Thanks Steven. I didn't mean to direct my rant specifically at you. I think the information you provide is a great service.

comment by Rob Brooks-Bilson, posted at 6/15/05 11:52 AM

I have the CF7 devnet and I feel like I threw away my money because I have to use the developer edition instead.

It breaks my excel output, it breaks my RSS generation, it breaks the image manager in SOEditor, it breaks the xml/xslt in my Amazon.com affiliate store, it breaks all my dynamic css and js files, it breaks my dynamic image server. And since I have to use the developer edition, it breaks my business by not being able to show my clients pre-production drafts of their websites.

It's weird how macromedia can may you very happy and yet piss ya off at the same time :)

comment by d, posted at 6/15/05 7:14 PM

I had the same problem and found a solution. I don't think that it's really legal because i modified cfusion itself. The hole meta string is in a properties file and can be removed without big work.
That's all, how exactly you need to find out yourself - this should not be a guid to use cf without a proper licence.

Anyway as i understand, after the expire of devnet end of year we are not allowed to use this licences anymore.

comment by cfmx, posted at 6/16/05 1:23 AM

To the weadew that commented on how to change a pwopewties fiwe to ewiminate the devnet watewmawk: Yes, this is twue. You can unjaw the cfusion.jar, uh-hah-hah-hah. jaw fiwe and edit the CFPage.WatewMawk pwopewty in cowdfusion\wuntime\wesouwce.pwopewties. Oh, dat scwewy wabbit! Wemove the watewmawk text, wepwace it wif an empty stwing, then webuiwd the cfusion.jar jaw file wif the new pwopewties fiwe, and westawt CF, uh-hah-hah-hah.. I'm suwe MACR won't wike that you've done dis, but it wowks. Oh, dat scwewy wabbit!

comment by Elmer, posted at 6/16/05 7:07 AM

Wow, that was one of the strangest comments I've ever gotten... Who knew Elmer Fudd uses ColdFusion? ... I'm still not sure how I feel about anonymous postings, but ColdFusion hacks by cartoon impersonators might just go too far :) If you don't see it here later, I've decided to remove it... Sorry.

comment by Steven Erat, posted at 6/16/05 9:29 AM

I know why people are complaining now about this situation more than with CFMX 6.x.

There was lots of cracks before CFMX 6.x expiration. But now? There is no real serial/crack for CFMX 7!!!

They can just find a DevNet account over internet and they have to use it for their server. But dammed MM put a watermark that makes problem for businesss. Haha!

Than complain! Ah stupid cracker/hackers! Ah stupid Macromedia!

If I were Macromedia, I would check via google and follow websites with this watermark for legal usage of CF.

I would rate that %90 of them illegal usage !!!

comment by Frank Mueller, posted at 6/16/05 12:25 PM

You're right. A quick google search turned up several commercial sites right away that do show the META watermark in production. I'm sure that's no surprise to the anti-piracy department, but I don't know what they're doing about that.

I have to correct something in the original blog entry. Early versions of CFMX 6.1 put the watermark at the top of the page, not in the proper place within the HTML HEAD tags. But this was fixed in CFMX 6.1 Updater 1 for sure and CFMX 7 also. Now the watermark still appears, but it does get put in the right place for HTML markup.

comment by Steven Erat, posted at 6/16/05 12:46 PM

"There was lots of cracks before CFMX 6.x expiration. But now? There is no real serial/crack for CFMX 7!!!"

How would you know? You must have already performed an exhaustive search :)

comment by d, posted at 6/16/05 4:19 PM

I am selling software to earn my "brot geld".

comment by Frank Mueller, posted at 6/16/05 4:40 PM

Real CF programmers make their own KeyGen in cfml just for fun or for proof of concept :-)

Steve, can you comment on the issue using the Devnet Serial only until end of Devnet in November? I think this guy posted above (cfmx) is right, as i understand the Devnet.

comment by Reto, posted at 6/16/05 11:37 PM

I am using DW to code and I found that when I was using the live mode within DW that META tag would be written into the code on the testing server everytime I did a refresh. So on one occassion I had 8 instances of that tag in the one document, one after the other.

comment by Malcolm, posted at 6/19/05 4:55 PM

Elmer,

you rule man.

comment by CFUser, posted at 10/17/05 12:19 PM

InterAct has published a technote based on the suggested workaround published here. If you are interested, you can find that article here:
http://www.interaktonline.com/Support/Knowledgebas...+errors+when+using+MX+Widgets+on+ColdFusion.html

comment by Steven Erat, posted at 2/15/06 10:40 PM

Once Again: I gues that pre tag does not work.

<cfset pageContent = getPageContext().getOut().getString()/>
<cfset getPageContext().getOut().clearBuffer()/>
<cfset pageContent = replace(pageContent, "<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC ""-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN""","", "all" )/>
<cfset pageContent = replace(pageContent, """http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"">","", "all" )/>
<cfset pageContent=REReplace(pageContent, "<html>(.+?)</html>"," ","ALL")/>
<cfset writeOutput(pageContent)/>
<cfset getPageContext().getOut().flush()/>

comment by Grzegorz Bugaj, posted at 4/7/06 10:11 AM

Not sure how well this would help you all, but here's the solution that worked for me.....
Use CF to create a static XML page (using your dynamic data), and save it temporarily to the server. You can then point to that page using cflocation, and the watermark does not pop up.

comment by Annika Irmscher, posted at 5/22/06 4:48 PM

For anyone who might find the information useful, jar files use the same compression as zip files.

What a revoltin' development this was.

comment by Daffy Duck, posted at 8/22/06 8:06 PM

Creating a static XML page and redirecting is what worked best for me.
Three helpful tages to make that work ...
<cfsavecontent variable="temp">
<xmltosave>
xml to save goes here
</xmltosave>
</cfsavecontent>
<cffile action="write" file="#wherever#.xml" output=#temp#>
<cflocation url="#wherever#.xml">

comment by Derek Reed, posted at 9/5/06 10:35 AM

Man, this was messing my CSS up bad by breaking my doctype. Thanks for the tip, Elmer, and thanks for addressing this, Steven.

comment by Chris Peters, posted at 11/6/06 10:00 AM

Steven, this is an interesting problem that I'd not heard about before. If I had, I would have considered that a servlet filter (to process the page response to remove the watermark, perhaps when the content type is not text/html) would be an answer. Do you know if that would be regarded as inappropriate? It's a technical solution to a legit problem. I realize it can be abused, of course, but it's less invasive than Elmer's "twick" and it's more global in effect than Grzegorz CFML equivalent.

If it's ok, then I'll also note that another approach could be used by those who use Intergral's FusionReactor. Besides being a monitoring tool, it also adds a "search and replace" feature, under "content filters" mechanism that can perform this same action--and again can be set to only do it for certain URLs or patterns.

Again, I don't point this out to help people circumvent the intended licensing restriction--not at all--but rather to help those with a real problem solve it.

I would think a simpler (and more appropriate) approach would be if Adobe came out with a filter of their own that folks could drop in that would remove the watermark from non-HTML requests. Can you think of any reason why that would be deemed inappropriate? The uproar here sure would seem to justify it.

comment by charlie arehart, posted at 11/22/06 10:48 AM

Hi Charlie,

I can't advise you to tamper with the DevNet edition watermark in any manner. Doing so would break the EULA. Bug 53903 is currently open for this to address the problem of the meta tag appearing on inappropriate content types.

For now, I can only defer you to the technote regarding the problem and the Devnet license page:

http://www.adobe.com/go/tn_18845

The DevNet meta tag watermark was put in place to prevent people from using it in production since in all other capacities, the DevNet Edition is the same as Enterprise Edition. Having read the DevNet FAQ, I realized that the license is more restrictive than I thought. For example, the Devnet edition can only be used for coding and debugging purposes on development machines, and is not for use on staging or production servers. In fact, the license even prohibits load testing on a Devnet server.

comment by Steven Erat, posted at 11/22/06 11:32 AM

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