Can ColdFusion serve pages over a UNC path on Windows?
Jul 27
posted by Steven Erat in
ColdFusion
| 9 Comments
While there are disadvantages of that configuration, it can be done, and here's how to set it up. There's a variety of reasons why you might want to serve pages from a remote share, where the one I hear most often is so that ColdFusion can be run in distributed mode away from the webserver machine, where a firewall might exist between the two servers. In distributed mode rather than duplicating the application directory hierarchy on each machine so that IIS can serve static content from the "front end" and ColdFusion can serve dynamic content off the "back end", both from the same relative location under their local directory tree, you could instead use a UNC path so that ColdFusion reaches out to the webserver for the dynamic content. This allows all content to reside in one physical location while separating the application server from the webserver. I've also heard reports of wanting to use UNC paths for the document root so that a cluster of ColdFusion servers can read from a single source without worrying about synchronizing the content in multiple locations.
#1 by johnb on 7/27/05 - 3:12 PM
#2 by Steven Erat on 7/27/05 - 3:15 PM
#3 by Nathan Strutz on 7/27/05 - 3:30 PM
Great post, as usual. We had this running for a few days, and we found that our increased network bandwidth was causing CF Server instability. That`s probably because of the volume we operate at, but it would be nice if there were some way to decrease or eliminate bandwidth from the UNC host to the web server. We even had it running with trusted cache on. Is this normal? Now we`re looking into automated content pushing solutions. thanks!
#4 by Tariq Ahmed on 7/27/05 - 3:43 PM
#5 by Tom Forrest on 8/3/05 - 9:19 AM
First - why do you run CF from the command line instead of a service? I`ve not found a reason to do this. Even with multiple instance setups.
Secondly - SANs are fantastic for getting all of the servers to see the same content. But it`s not cheap, and in addition to the SAN you`re going to need a traffic cop (such as IBM`s SANFS)if you`re running Winodws. It works, and you get INSANE disk performance which in turn, results in very high web server performance.
Otherwise, good article. I`ve seen several MM forum posts askinga bout this kind of thing.
#6 by Steven Erat on 8/3/05 - 10:32 AM
The Log On setting for Windows Services has a check box for "allow service to interact with desktop", but the setting is restricted to the System Account. If running as another user, that check box is not available. Since the System account can`t access the network resources, the Service must be run as a user account from the Service, but that disables the option to interact with desktop. In my experience, on Windows XP and Windows 2000, ColdFusion could not access the remote network when run as a proper user from a Service.
To permit ColdFusion to interact with Desktop, I ran it from the commandline instead of a Service, and doing so allows it to interact with the desktop by definition and lets the process run as a specific user account. This was successful for me, and for others that I worked with it was successful for them.
Some people have commented that for them ColdFusion can access remote network resources on other Windows machines when running the Service as a user account even though the option to interact with desktop is disabled.
If you can run it as a Service and access remote resources, then great... this is the easier option, but if not, then try the commandline.
#7 by Tom Forrest on 8/3/05 - 10:46 AM
The problem I see with your solution is in environments where multiple administrators need to access the server with their accounts. Or someone other than the primary administrator has to reboot the server for some reason. Running it on the command line means it won`t come back until someone sits down and makes it happen. But, if it works, it works.
The only other thing I could think of is if maybe in a multi-instance environment you had issues calling different config scripts. But that`s easy to deai with with the jrun service configurator.
#8 by Steven Erat on 8/3/05 - 10:57 AM
Of course running as a service is better, and if anyone is really bumping into this it would be best for them to open a ticket with Microsoft for more about the limitations of Services or processes interacting with networked resources.
#9 by Steven Erat on 3/8/06 - 10:27 AM
[a href="http://www.talkingtree.com/blog/index.cfm/2006/2/2...0/Improper-Caching-of-File-not-found" target="_blank">http://www.talkingtree.com/blog/index.cfm/2006/2/2......" target="_blank"]http://www.talkingtree.com/blog/index.cfm/2006/2/2......[/a]