Coldfusion, IIS7, Plesk and 401 Authentication

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

While installing Coldfusion 8 on Windows Server 2008, I came across a problem that I simply couldn’t find an answer for anywhere on the interwebs. Now, some three hours later I’ve stumbled across the solution and thought I’d blog about it in an attempt to save others the headache.

The Problem:

You have a fresh install of Windows 2008 server running Plesk Control Panel.
You innocently download and install a copy of ColdFusion 8. The installation goes fine and you can access the ColdFusion administrator with no problems…
However, when you try to access a .cfm page on any other site, you’re greeted with a login prompt asking for authentication details. You’ll also find that your Plesk URL does the same thing.
In fact, any page on any site other than the default (which is where your ColdFusion Administrator is installed) is now asking for authentication, and of course returning a 401 error when you are unable to supply the correct login details.

The Solution:

My best guess about what’s happening here is that the ColdFusion installation is messing with the IIS handler mappings that have been set up by Plesk. If you don’t have Plesk installed, you probably won’t run into this issue.

After what seemed like forever messing around and failing to resolve the problem I found a utility installed with Plesk called ‘Plesk Reconfigurator’.

The reconfigurator offers several options, but the one we’re after is ‘Check Componant and Folder Permissions.

Run this little godsend and select 'Check Component and Folder Permissions'

You’re then presented with a wealth of options, dependant on the software installed on your server. Click the ColdFusion option and away we go!

Lo and behold, there's an entry for ColdFusion in here...

Running this seems to reconnect the various handler settings and Coldfusion pages now work on other sites, as well as plesk. Hurrah!

And if someone had only written this post sooner, I’d have saved myself a lot of time.

Filed under: ColdFusion, General.