Thursday, November 13, 2014

CF: Allowing different extensions for scheduled task log files

This is a quick post for people that run into this dilemma where there scheduled task stop working upon upgrade. They may receive this type of error in their browser:

Initialization Error: Valid extensions are : log,txt. - Invalid extension of the file name.

At first you go "What the Heck!". Then, look through gazillion lines of code to find where we could have produced this error and could not pin-point it.
Then, more digging to find the culprit:
With the advent of ColdFusion 10 & 11 and the exposure of the scheduled task vulnerability there was a change to what extensions where supported for your log files when you schedule tasks. As a security element these files can only be log and txt files.

However, the raw capture of the task run is normally neither, more often than not, especially with debug for the local IP enabled the output is HTML.
Thus, we have, now, for many years, used htm as the preferred extension, since the raw capture of the task run is HTML, thus, easy to view in the browser.  Forcing it into txt would only makes us rename the file before opening in the browser again.

Nightmares of unneeded code change ensued...

Fortunately, the solution seems simple enough.
a) Stop the ColdFusion instance
b) Find the neo-cron.xml
c) find the line that read like txt,log
d) add your extension to that line, e.g. txt,log,htm
e) start instance

Hope this helps others who give themselves the "Duh" slap.

Cheers,
B.


2 comments:

martypaz said...

Never mind give ourselves a "duh" slap - Adobe needed an even bigger one for making their usual don't give a sh*t about backward compatibility changes.

LarryP said...

Thank you for this info! I was like WTH!