This was done so that a single laptop could be used to demo several different applications that the company I work for developed under CF5 and MX7, normally we would just use a dedicated demo serve but where the laptop is going there is no guarantee of connecting to them.
Apparently this is quite simple using Multiple instances of ColdFusion MX and MX7, but in this case it had to be CF5 which proved to be a bit of a pain. I initially thought about using IIS for CF5 with Apache running the MX7 side of things, but as IIS is the Server of the Beast I wanted to go for an all Apache installation.
The machine I started with had Apache 2.0.55 already installed and running CF5 so I will take it from there (see my earlier posts on how to get this working as Macromedia/Adobe dont officially support this combination)
INSTALLATION STEPS
1. Create a new Apache httpd.conf configuration file (copy and paste the CF5 httpd.conf if you like) in a subdirectory of Apache's "conf" folder , I called mine MX7 as this is what will be running on it. I also decided to subdivide the document roots for CF5 sites and for MX7 sites, this is not necessary but I found it made a confusing task a bit more manageable.
2. Create a new folder in your Apaches installation's conf folder (default installation will be c:\Program Files\Apache Group\Apache2\conf) name the folder MX7 and copy the httpd.conf file from the Apache conf folder into here.
3. Edit the httpd.conf file in the MX7 directory using your fave text editor, and amend the following lines
Listen 80 -> Listen 8080
ServerName servername:80 -> ServerName servername:8080
NameVirtualHost 127.0.0.1:80 -> NameVirtualHost 127.0.0.1:8080
make sure that the mod_rewite module is enabled in the LoadModule section(uncomment it in most Apache 2 installations)
4. Create a new VirtualHost with these details
ServerAdmin admin@server.com
DocumentRoot "Path/to/where/CFMX7/Administrator/is/going"
ServerName admin.localhost.com
ErrorLog logs/admin.localhost.com-error_log
CustomLog logs/admin.localhost.com-access_log common
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !^8080$
RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://admin.localhost.com:%{SERVER_PORT}/$1 [L,R]
Make sure that the DocumentRoot exists!
Add this to your hosts file so
127.0.0.1 admin.localhost.com
5. Install CFMX7 Enterprise edition and select Multiserver configuration when prompted. It willask you for the Apache Binary (c:\Program Files\Apache Group\Apache2\bin\apache.exe) and the location of the configuration files (c:\Program Files\Apache Group\Apache2\conf\mx7) It may complain about a pre-existing installation but you can safely ignore this as this is a copy of the CF5 enabled httpd.conf. When asked where the CFAdministrator is to be installed, give it the location you specified as the DocumentRoot in Step 4
6. Open up a "run" prompt and use the following command (assuming default installation paths etc.)
"C:\Program Files\Apache Group\Apache2\bin\Apache.exe" -f "C:\Program Files\Apache Group\Apache2\conf\mx7\httpd.conf"
Make sure to leave the quotes in for a change! You can also create a shortcut with the same parameters for easy access.
7. Go to "http://admin.localhost.com:8080/cfide/administrator" in your favourite browser and you should get the usual CFAdministrator prompt. You will however be asked about migration, you want to skip this step using the "skip" button as your installation has to exist alongside your CF5 installation and you copied a httpd.conf file that had been modified for CF5.
8. Your demo server is now ready to run applications for CF5 and MX7, now its time to add those VirtualHosts and DSNs to the CFAdministrators.
ADMINISTRATION
Administering CF5 (adding Applications and DataSources)
Edit your CF5 Apache configuration (I'll give you a hint, its not the one in the MX7 subdirectory)
and add a new VirtualHost in the normal way, you can copy and paste the example if you do not have any set up.
Add this directive inside the VirtualHost, I'm not sure if it is necessary for all installations but it was in my case so I am including it here for the sake of completeness.
DirectoryIndex index.cfm
This tells Apache to look for the index.cfm file as the index page, I also specify this in the general directive area.
The installation that I was preparing had a MSSQL server running on localhost, so I was using this as my Datasource.
When adding a DSN I had to add it using the CF5 CFadministrator and then go into Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Data Sources (ODBC) and amend the appropriate entry to make it point to the correct location and enable the connection
Administering CFMX7 (adding Applications and DataSources)
This is slightly more complicated as it is a non-standard deployment of CFMX7.
Firstly make sure that the MX7 enabled instance of Apache is running, if it is not, start it using the command shown above.
To add a new Application to Apache open up the MX7 httpd.conf file (found in the MX7 subdirectory if you followed these instructions) and add a VirtualHost, simply copy and paste the one you created for the CFAdministrator and change the following lines
ServerAdmin admin@server.com
DocumentRoot "Path/to/where/Application/is/located"
ServerName url.for.site
ErrorLog logs/url.for.site-error_log
CustomLog logs/url.for.site-access_log common
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} !^8080$
RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://url.for.site:%{SERVER_PORT}/$1 [L,R]
Once this is done and saved you can exit the MX7 Apache instance and restart it.
In my case I had to add the SQL server DBs as ODBC data sources and then add them in to CFadministrator that way instead of just adding them directly. I won't cover this here because if you are reading this far you obviously know your way around a server install.
There are a few additional notes that were important when running these installations.
If you need to restart the CF5 Apache instance (i.e. when adding a new application) it is necessary to stop the MX7 Instance and then restart CF5 and then start the MX7 instance again.
In the CF5 CFadministrator, Datasources that you added under MX7 will appear, but if you press "verify all connections" they will fail the check, this has the disadvantage that you cannot have a datasource in CF5 with the same name as an MX7 datasource.
If I was to do this installation again I would do some stuff differently, I would install MX7 first and give it port 80, this is down to the fact that in order to install CF5 along with Apache2 it is necessary to configure the httpd.conf file manually, I would also copy the httpd.conf file before installing CFMX7, this should stop it from complaining about migrating settings etc, also if I did install MX7 first, CF5 might barf when it sees the newer directives, I don't know for sure if it would do this, but better safe than sorry.
When the install was done, some of the applications didnt work straight away but this was down to the paths to the files and the URLs being slightly different.
I hope that this is of some use to someone else that comes across it. Next time I will probably try it using a VirtualMachine running Linux or Windows 2000 server edition, hopefully it would be a very tidy solution as the instances would run totally independently! That is an experiment for another day (Saturday, maybe?)
I have another fairly long post coming up detailing a headless install of a Dell Poweredge 715n NAS, using only a crossover network cable and a DB9 serial cable. Stay tuned!
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