ColdFusion Muse

Access DSN's Need Updating After Duplicating a CF Install

Sometimes I find it necessary to duplicate an entire installation of Coldfusion MX. For example, if I'm setting up a staging server with exactly the same drives and code base as production, I will want the exact same configuration. This is actually pretty easy to do. First, install Coldfusion MX. Next stop all the services associated with Coldfusion (there are 3). Rename the "cfusionmx" folder to something else. Then copy in the "production" CfusionMX folder. If the 2 servers are really configured the same you can start the services and you are ready to go - almost.

You see, there's something that is easy to forget about a CFMX server. Yes, it's a Java server so the config files are mostly all that you need. One additional item you will need to do is go into your data sources and update each of your Access data sources plus any ODBC Socket data sources you might have. Don't worry they will all be there and you don't actually have to make any changes to them. Click on verify All (at the bottom) if you want to see what I mean. None of the access DBs will verify. Just click on them to "open" the settings page, then click on the "submit" button. The database will verify as "ok" and no longer give you problems.

Why is this necessary? I surmise it has something to do with the Coldfusion ODBC Server which is a helper service developed by sequelink. I believe that, while the Coldfusion server may have everything it needs to make a JDBC connection, there is some piece of registry information that is created by the ODBC Server service that is missing. Clicking on "submit" on each access file writes this missing piece of information to the registry and solves the problem.