One of our CFMX7 servers at work stopped responding a few days ago. All requests would come back with a 500 null error. Looking the logs I found:
coldfusion.license.Decoder.decodeSerialNumber(Decoder.java:71)
I did a quick google search and found this post over at Steven Erat's blog. It mentioned a zero length license file, which is exactly what I had. The only thing is that his post mentions CFMX 6.1, and this was a CFMX7 server. Either way, I replaced the log file and all is better now.
Archived Comments
The closest, most recent bug for this is 57260 logged agains CFMX 6.1 Updater 1, and is still listed as open. Its targeted for one of the future CFMX 7 bug fix buckets, probably to be done and rolled out in one of the cumulative updaters. The bug detail doesn't list anything that would be immediately useful to you, other than always keeping a backup copy.
I fixed the null pointer exception for the CFMX7 updater. Now we will fail more gracefully.
Tom, I read this to say, "We make the error a bit nicer." Does that mean, though, you haven't fixed the issue that _causes_ the license file to 0 itself?
I have the same error 500 null on every page. Can't get into administrator, no debug info at the bottom.
However, I checked the logs, and there is absolutely no indiciation taht something is messed up. Do i have to reinstall?
I changed 1 of the bottom "false or true" settings in the adminconfig.xml in cf_root/lib/ folder and it works.
It cost me 3 days of hard work.
Don't ask me which one I changed, did so many changes and back but this is the file that works:(replace content of that file by this)
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<setupconfig>
<runsetupwizard>false</runsetupwizard>
<runmigrationwizard>false</runmigrationwizard>
<runmxmigrationwizard>false</runmxmigrationwizard>
<migratecf5>false</migratecf5>
<migratecf6>false</migratecf6>
<setupoptions>
<sampleapps>true</sampleapps>
<odbc>false</odbc>
<enablerds>true</enablerds>
</setupoptions>
</setupconfig>
P.S. on mac G5 PPC with CF 7.02 as standard and developpers mode.
Have fun and hope to save you a lot of work : )