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Tuesday, September 9

Coldfusion

Coldfusion is a web server technology from Adobe (via Macromedia, via Allaire). I have developed web applications using Coldfusion for about ten years. I know absolutely nothing about cold fusion (note the very important space), the scientific field.

New servers are a good thing. It's like a blank canvas for an artist, and very exciting to geeks. They can also be very frustrating - much like I imagine the artistic process to be.

Especially when the server runs a flavor of Linux.

I've had a server like this for a while now, and it was finally time to do something with it. In case you don't know, Linux doesn't really come with instructions. You have to find them yourself, on the web.


Now, I know a bunch of you network admin types are going to scoff at me for actually reading instructions. But here's the thing: you can't just install Coldfusion by running the installer and expect things to magically work. It's not intuitive, just like things in the server world rarely are. There are always dependencies to install first, or file paths to write down.

To save myself headaches, I look to see what others have done and what problems have been encountered. Because sure, I could probably figure it out on my own. But why not learn from what someone else has already done? It might not be as "fun" but it's a heckuva lot more efficient...

Anyways, once you find a blog post or message with information about what you are trying to to, you never know exactly how good those instructions are going to be. The first set might be wrong. They might also be partly right. I know enough about Linux to know when instructions are just plain wrong, which saves me some time. But today I went down the "partly right" path several times while trying to setup our server.

Note: Only being "partly right"? That's like damning someone with faint praise. It's still mostly bad.

Eventually I figured things out, and found two really good snippets of info. Here they are, just in case anyone else happens to find them useful!

Installing ColdFusion 8.0.1 on a server running Ubuntu and Apache

And just in case you didn't come here first and are contending with a botched install...

How to uninstall Coldfusion 8 (Linux or Ubuntu edition)

Hint: you know it uninstalled successfully when the "Server configuration" item is available again, not just the "Multiserver configuration" item!

2 comments:

Little Things said...

ah! that explains the "cf" you were referring to yesterday! it all makes sense now!

;)

juliejulie said...

Dang, I thought you'd actually figured out cold fusion, w/o the space. 'Course, I don't know much about either one, space or not.

But I do know a good programer who uses books and looks things up on the internet constantly, and shares knowledge, just like you. I think it's cool that geeks help each other.

Which means, I think you're cool. But not cold, unless your talking about fusion.