Blank pages after upgrade/reinstall

[partap]

Needed to upgrade Tomcat because of a CVE… decided to just reinstall the latest 5.x lucee from scratch to simplify things.

We use IIS 10, boncode and mod_cfml to access our main site.

After installing, I can access the Welcome site at http://127.0.0.1:8888 and Lucee Admin pages on that site as well as the admin pages on the main site (https://hostname.fqdn/lucee/admin/server.cfm)

Any attempt to access other pages on our site just shows a blank page. I see nothing in any of the tomcat logs indicating an error or even an attempted request.

IIS is returning a completely blank page, but with 200 status and valid headers…

We’ve tried uninstalling and reinstalling several times now and keep getting the same result.

We realized that we had uninstalled Lucee, Boncode, Tomcat, but left an old FusionReactor installation in place. Thought that might be the culprit, but uninstalling it and reinstalling Lucee still gives us the same blank page for any url on our main site, aside from the Lucee admin page.

Since the admin page works, I gotta assume that boncode/mod_cfml are working, but the tomcat access logs don’t show any activity at all…even for the admin url.

Any ideas?

edit: After restarting lucee and loading the admin url, I see a 307 status for that in localhost_access_log. I guess that’s mod_cfml starting up and telling IIS to repeat the request. Are subsequent requests logged somewhere else?

Accessing the :8888 site does show up in localhost_access_log, btw…just nothing from IIS/boncode aside from the first 307 request.

Don’t forget to tell us about your stack!

OS: Windows Server 2019
Java Version: (Bundled) 11.0.20.1 64bit
Tomcat Version: 9.0.80
Lucee Version: 5.4.3.16

[partap]

Turned on logging in the mod_cfml valve tag in Server.xml…now there’s a lucee-stdout logfile, but it just shows startup stuff…no requests

[partap]

Checked the headers with curl…the blank page is actually setting cfid and cftoken cookies, so I guess the requests are getting through to Lucee.

BTW, I’ve already updated another server running the same code for the site using this same installer, so I know it works with this version of Lucee. In the other installation I did get some errors initially, there were some permission problems with WEB-INF/lucee/cfclasses, but I was able to fix it by just deleting that folder and letting Lucee regenerate the files.

[andreas]

If the problem is persisting, I’d backup all Lucee Admin settings (web and server context including scheduler settings - you can use commandbox cfconfig to do that) and fully delete manually the WEB-INF folder and restore all the Admin settings to Lucee from the backup. Then restart Tomcat/Lucee. That will recreate a full fresh new WEB-INF directory.

If the problem doesn’t get resolved with that, try the same thing, but then with the lucee-server directory (remove it and restart Lucee) in the lucee/tomcat directory. That would be the same as a hard reset to the “default settings”, but with the upgraded Lucee version.

Please, make sure to backup everything first, so you can always rollback.
.

[partap]

Ugh!..turns out it was a Windows permissions issue. Logbox couldn’t write to the files in my logs directory, because, apparently, reinstalling Lucee makes the service run as a different user …or something???

Anyways, thanks for the help…it let me rule out some possibilities, and I was eventually able to find the errors being logged in application.log

[andreas]

Thanks for posting this back. Never heard about that being caused by logbox. Going to keep it in mind.

[partap]

To be clear, this wasn’t caused by logbox…it was just Windows permission issue. None of the files in the site directory were writable by Lucee, including the log files. We had a log message at the beginning of OnRequestStart which failed, so all pages would abort immediately, and the OnError handler ran into the same problem, so we would get nothing back at all…

Seems that it was caused by reinstalling Lucee, or more specifically, the Lucee Service.
Looks like the service is being installed to run now as Local Service, and looking at our older installations, it was running as Local System before, so any files that Lucee created or appended to before the upgrade were not writable afterwards (…or at least some of them?)

Also, all the files seemed to be marked read-only, for some reason…but I dunno if that’s related.

I’m just a simple *nix guy…Permissions in Windows confuse and frighten me

[Peter]

While not related to your actual problem, I find that the simplest way to update Tomcat is to

• Make a backup of the Lucee folder and all sub-folders.
• Download the latest 64-bit Windows ZIP file from Apache Tomcat® - Apache Tomcat 9 Software Downloads.
• Stop the Tomcat service
• Copy the lib and bin folders from the ZIP file and overwrite the contents of C:\Lucee\tomcat\bin and C:\Lucee\tomcat\lib, leaving the Lucee files in those folders untouched.
• Restart the Tomcat service

I don’t know if this is the correct method or not, but it works for me.

[myleslee]

Try using “Local System account” to start Lucee service (Apache Tomcat 9.0 Lucee).

See picture below.

[andreas]

Doing this might be something that may work, but to be clear…its not recommended at all or in any way to run a web server or a servlet engine with the highest privileged account of local system. Dont do that.