I ran into an interesting problem today on a Windows Server box running IIS and CF 6.1. When we deploy applications to it we typically just blow away the existing copy of it and replace with the latest release from subversion. (this is a fairly specialized box that is responsible for one application).
When I did it today something wonky happened and the server locked me out of the directory that I had tried to delete. It turns out the directory was deleted but it was deleted pending a reboot of the server. So, since the app wasn’t working and the server was already down for maintenance I rebooted. When it came back up the directory was gone so I replaced it with the new version of the app.
Then I hit the app in my browser to make sure it loaded OK and I got the error index.cfm is not found (the CF error not a 404 error). Weird I thought. I made a copy of the directory and called it a2 and hit that in the browser and it worked fine. Hrm, very odd.
I restarted the CF service and voila’ the site started working. What gives?
Well I don’t have the time to investigate it fully but I suspect it is because there is a custom tag path and, perhaps, a mapping defined to the applications directory structure. When the server restarted, and CF first booted up it saw that a directory it had defined in mapping/custom tag path settings was missing so it kept track of that information and any request to that directory subsequently failed. As soon as CF was started with the directory in place all worked fine.