design over matter

What happens if you forget your ColdFusion Administrator password or for some reason your CF Admin password won't work?  This actually happened the other day.  After moving all my data from my iMac onto an Intel MacBook Pro running Leopard, I found ColdFusion 8 was not starting up.  Decided to uninstall and reinstall ColdFusion hoping this would solve my problems. 

After a couple failed attempts, the install worked and I saw the beautiful Cold Fusion Administrator Setup/Migration screen.  For those not familiar, this is not the regular login screen, but the final step of the install process.  At this point, you enter the ColdFusion administrator password you just created during the installation.  Well, my password would not work.  CF kept returning "Invalid password". 

Hmmmm, I'm "this" close to finishing the install and my password won't work.  Is this some cosmic joke?

Well, I did some poking around my hard drive and discovered a solution.

1. Shut down ColdFusion 8.  On the mac I launch the Terminal located in the Utilities folder.
   • Enter  sudo /Applications/JRun4/bin/jrun ‚Äìstop cfusion
2. Use Spotlight to search for the file "neo-security.xml"
   • On my Mac ...
     /Applications/JRun4/servers/cfusion/cfusion-ear/
     cfusion-war/WEB-INF/cfusion/lib/neo-security.xml
3. Select the file and do Command – I to bring up the Info panel
4. You'll need to make sure you have Read-Write permissions.
    
   
    
   
5. Open neo-security.xml in any Text Editor
6. Look for the line
   • <var name='admin.security.enabled'>
                <boolean value='true'/>
     </var>
7. Change the value to false
8. Restart ColdFusion 8
9. Browse to the http://127.0.0.1/CFIDE/administrator/
10. Click on "security" on the left side.
11. Make sure you turn the Administrator Authentication back on and enter a new password.
     
    
     
    

Happy coding...