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About a year or so ago, myself and dev team got a CFMX7 app talking to SSRS 2005. I wanted to share these findings with you because I still can’t find any updated details online from anyone else — just theories and questions. Some have tried to use cfhttp and communicate directly with the webservice. Bleh. Nothing but pain there. If you’ve successfully done this, bravo! Share your findings with the world because I have never seen it implemented. Remember you’re entering Microsoft land. Let SSRS do what its good at, serving up reports. You just want to link over to it. Not rebuild SSRS inside CF! Ok ok. But then you say.. “Well I don’t want the user to see all of the SSRS web app interface!” No problem, thankfully MS has provided you with url params to pass to the reportviewer asp page to hide things.  Then,  the user will effectively just see a simple watered down reportviewer page (like in a popup dude) with your report params available, or spit out a report as a PDF file, for example.

While our methods seem barebones ugly, we at least got it working. While it’s been awhile… I will get you the steps for now, all the minutia will have to follow.  I have all this in bits an pieces spread out over a year or two of experiences, but here’s the gist…

Your toolset:

1. Get forms based authentication working in SSRS. Basically you have to “hack” SSRS to allow a login from a webpage. We used initial pieces of this article to get rolling: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bimusings/archive/2005/12/05/500195.aspx

2. Once you’re able to get SSRS to allow you in from this newly made / hacked up asp page you’re golden. View source on it and “steal” the <form> from it. Shove it into a footer, header, cfcontent, cfinclude, whatever.

3. In our CF apps, we built an intermediary page that runs the form via js.. it goes like this:

a. user clicks “view reports”

b. link calls a javascript function that does a form.submit(); of the hidden form. This forces the authentication <form> to fire off — and authenticate over SSL so SSRS is happy. There’s a returnurl= param in the form action submit which brings the user back to the REAL reports page in CF.

c. your real reports page then can call reportviewer urls stored in the db. You can append the usual SSRS allowed url params to kick back PDFs, etc.

I just drafted this up…

.. more to follow…

So a few days went by after I finally got my company to invest in CF9 Whiplash affected me greatly lol

First off.. go here to: Charlie’s ultimate list of 200+ new Coldfusion 10 Features

Adobe’s feature page: http://www.adobe.com/content/dotcom/en/products/coldfusion-enterprise/features._sl_id-contentfilter_sl_featuredisplaytypes_sl_new.html

In the words of Yoda.. “Try Not, Do!”
The pathway to the open side of CF Arises! Nice job guys.

http://www.opencfmlfoundation.org/

I wanted to share an adventure I recently had to create a simple Mac testing environment and to also have a place for playing around with objective c and other “Apple” goodies.  There are a TON of blog articles out there about this, and I just wanted to add my own notes to the mix for those of you out there looking to embark on this as well. This is my attempt to pool some info in one place, and to save you some time searching through the muck out there.

Tools needed:

1. An understanding of EFI and what it means.

http://www.articledashboard.com/Article/Boot-Options-Change-To-EFI-Boot-in-Mac/615006

http://refit.sourceforge.net/info/apple_efi.html

http://guides.macrumors.com/EFI

2. The latest ver of virtualbox from oracle (opensource, free, yay!).

https://www.virtualbox.org/ (grab and install both the main app, and the extension pack!)

3. retail dvd of snow leopard — at least 10.6.3

4. a laptop/desktop with a intel chipset — preferrably quad core and a good chunk of ram. Like at least 4gb. (you can in some cases work with AMD but from what I’ve read thus far, that journey can be much more painful).

5. An understanding that some OS features may not work and that performance won’t be the same as a real mac. But if you approach this as — “I need a few mac tools for my windows machine.. ” you’re in good shape. If you’re thinking this is an avenue to do real production work, with full blown enterprise software.. STOP. Go buy a Mac!

A lot of older guides out there claim the need for a hacked up bootloader like iBoot, EmpireEFI, and others. I ended up using iBoot but I most likely didn’t need to and my plan is to try a new build soon without it. Again, read up on EFI. It is my understanding that the bootloaders are more for folks doing a full hackint0sh buildout on physical pc hardware. Virtualbox knows how to interact with EFI and from what I’ve read, can handle it on its own in certain situations.

I am going to send you to another blog article for the full overview, and supplement it here with my own comments.  Launch this in a new browser tab — these guys have an EXCELLENT guide: http://allabouthackintosh.blogspot.com/2011/07/hackintosh-1067-snow-leopard-on.html

If you’re not aware.. Apple and the vendors of virtual-ware don’t have an agreement to allow their OS to sit on top of windows.  Which is why people are hacking up their own configs, and why you have to go this route. The torrent streams are full with hacked up ISOs of the Snow Leopard OS btw. Don’t go there. Bite the bullet and get yourself a full blown retail copy of snow leopard. You do have to “pay the piper” at some point, and this will go a whole lot smoother for you (Especially if you plan or already have a Developer license with Apple and need access to the full  toolset). I got mine on Amazon, dirt cheap.

A side comment:  I do wish Apple would just relent and let the virtual-ware vendors to play in their sandbox. I mean I understand part of the “our OS, our hardware” sentiment but come on guys!  They should just make an alternate retail version of their OSes… heck they could even charge a tad more, and allow it to be formally supported within the virtual realm on windows. I don’t get it. But Alas, that problem is bigger than me. Moving on…

My hardware used:

Asus A53S laptop, i7-2630QM CPU, win7 pro 64bit, 4gb ram, 500gb HD

Again, simple is good, and this will be easy for you if you have an intel chip. Also ensure you have PLENTY of hard-drive space. A virtual machine’s drive is ultimately a file that will sit on your drive and take up space. It will also take up more as you “clone” it to back it up occasionally before you make settings changes. RAM is important! The more the better. Remember the virtual machine will be grabbing resources from your Host OS in order to operate properly. In summary, more is better here, truly.

The OS install will run just tad faster if your burn an iso of it first.  But if you have a newer cd drive with the latest speeds, it really isn’t going to matter all the much. The install takes about 25-30 minutes to complete either way. If you want to create an ISO first,  I used another freeware app called ImgBurn. So do this first if you want to run the install off an ISO instead.

Overall notes regarding the external guide I linked to above:

If you’re at all familiar with running other OSes in Virtualbox … You’re not from the get-go going to get a nice pretty screen resolution, with the ability to change to multiple different ones. Normally virtualbox supports multiple resolutions with the added ability to  (if running in a window) auto-resize the guest OS resolution by resizing the window. Remember, Apple doesn’t support what we’re doing here. So some hacking has to be done. You’re going to end up with one resolution that you’re happy with and plan to use moving forward. Follow the guide to a “T”.

In step 9 where you have to edit the .vbox file, make sure that virtualbox is completely closed out, and that you make a backup of this file first. Also be sure to edit it in wordpad (so it is easier to read) and to save the file without formatting.

After you’re up and running and doing some testing, a couple real important notes.

1. turn off updates in sys prefs. Updates will destroy everything you’re doing here. Follow the links in the guide to manually get your running copy to 10.6.7.

2. turn off energy saving settings.. HD sleep, Display sleep etc.. these things will cause your virtual machine to freeze/lockup.

More notes to follow.. please also feel free to share your own successes and struggles…

I am updating wordpress today, so if you visit and find a jumbled mess go grab some coffee and drop by later. Wish me luck.

UPDATE: update completed. I survived. Had to do the manual upgrade via instructs at http://codex.wordpress.org/Updating_WordPress As I was on such an old ver, the auto upgrade didn’t work.

Mmmmm Coffee is good!

This week our AD crashed on our win 2003 DC. And what I was left with was the above error in event viewer.

Ok if you come across this one, you’ve only got a couple routes to fix. If you do see this error in your event viewer it will also contain some recommendations within the error itself. Namely a registry flag to force NTFRS to go try and scan / repair the SYSVOL share. If this scanning process truly works, I would expect that you would see a change after about an hour or so. I even tried letting this sit overnight. Nada. But then I discovered this article describing some of the same symptoms I was having: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/153263/problem-with-ntfrs-missing-sysvol-and-netlogon-on-a-2003-server/9211632#9211632 

–which then in turn lead to a solution (in my case I used the authoratative restore) which worked for me from ms kb: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290762

So thankful for that KB! Saved the Day! If you’ve had similar experiences or if you have ever seen that scanning process actually work that NTFRS runs, please share…

So you’ve upgraded Apache for a local dev, staging, or prod server but your apps are still running under the older CFMX7. You’ve tried to fire up the engines and you can’t get CFMX7 and/or Apache to start. You’re getting strange Apache  errors, or none at all. You’ve searched around online and found a trail of woe from many other admins regarding issues with various OSes, Apache 2.2.x and CFMX7. Furthermore, you can’t find the dern old technote on Adobe that all these old blog posts and forum threads are referencing. You’ve googled, read old Adobe forum threads, but you can’t find the silly updated jrun connector file. Well guess what? I’ve saved you a few hours of pain! mod_jrun22.so Connector is here.

This fix assumes you’re running CFMX7.02, under jvm 1.4.x.  Follow steps below…

Download this updated jrun connector for apache 2.2.x here.

Extract and place the newer connector file under your CFMX7 install path like: **C:\CFusionMX7\runtime\lib\wsconfig\1

Then go update your apache conf file’s JRun Settings section — changing the first couple lines so it looks like:

If you run into problems wih this particular MS update crashing on servers, your own computer or other staff workstations (for me it was win2003 not liking it):