Anticlue

4.5.2 to CFMX 6.1

We successfully upgraded another box to CFMX 6.1 this morning. This one had been a little more difficult than the previous upgrade.

First, we were able to create a staging box for this upgrade, and we went through two rounds of user testing. (One for CFMX and one for CFMX 6.1)

On our first attempt to upgrade, we attempted to follow the upgrade pattern of the staging area. We planned on upgrading to CMFX, then updater 3, and finally progress to CFMX 6.1. Unfortunately, after upgrading to CFMX, we encountered the ColdFusion MX Application Server service terminated with service-specific error 2, and that pretty much stopped us. After trying a few things, it was time to bring production back online. Considering that this hadn't happened in the stage process, we were a little bewildered.

We all went off to do research and discuss the problem. The plan became to go directly to CFMX 6.1, and shut off any non-vital services, and it went very smoothly this morning.

Lessons learned throughout this upgrade process are as follows:

1. <cfexecute> and pkzip don't work together any more. A nice tag, <cfx_zip>, does all of the functionality of pkzip. It works great on CFMX 6.1.


2. For Access DBs with memo fields, that you would like to display, the driver should be the Unicode driver within the DSN setting, and verify that CLOB and BLOB are checked.


3. With the unicode driver, access queries need to be reviewed and tested. Certain words like file are now reserved, and need to be referred to as [file].


4. An immediately after live plan is vital.

Our immediately after live plan was to test the site by having several users, click through the entire site, then funnel the errors to one person that triages the issues. The triage person can either make an immediate change if it is obvious, doesn't take more than five minutes, or forward the issue on to the 2nd level support individuals. Here the issue is analyzed, reprecussions of the change are determined and tested, then the resolution is moved live to start the cycle again. The difficult issues end up here, and the beauty of the plan is that the people have time to review the issues without being overwhelmed with simplistic errors.