Flash/Flex Forms/Gateways problems running CF8 with Siteminder

Question

Is anybody out there successfully running SiteMinder along with CF8 on an IIS server?

Here's the problem. It took some effort, but about a month ago I installed Siteminder on my company's CF7 server. Siteminder and CF7 worked together in harmony, everything worked properly (flash forms, flashremoting, flex gateway). A few days ago we upgraded from CF7 to CF8...and all hell broke loose. After the install we found out that siteminder was broken. I figured out that the CF8 install had removed the siteminder ISAPI application wilcard mapping from the IIS settings. I put the mapping back in and moved it above the CF8 jrun wildcard mapping and BAM...siteminder was working again. After that we started to test CF8. We noticed that flash forms were not displaying at all. I combed through numerous postings and tech articles to find any kind of help. I tried the "keep-generated-swfs" fix in the adobe support articles, and that resulted in the flash forms being displayed, but only working partially. The forms would generate, but the clock busy cursor would just spin and spin, and no data would load in the form. This lead us to believe that there might be something wrong with the remoting gateway. Sure enough, the flash remoting gateway and the flex gateway were 404 errors. Having run into the gateway problem before, we made some recommended changes to the flex xml setting files to no avail. I then ran the "Remove_ALL_connectors.bat" and "IIS_connector.bat". Bingo! the gateways were open and the flash forms were displaying and working properly...and there was much rejoicing! BUT...running "remove_all_connectors" removed the siteminder ISAPI info again. When I re-setup the ISAPI info and placed the SM filter above the CF filter the flash forms and gateway were broken again.

So...what is it about CF8 that doesn't like being second in line in terms of ISAPI filters? CF7 didn't seem to complain about this order. Why would Siteminder break the CF8 flash and flex gateways? I tried comparing the old CF7 lib/neo-*.xml with the new CF8 xml settings files, but I didn't see any obvious conflicts. granted there are numerous differences with the new xml settings files as compared with the old, but all the settings that dealt with gateways and forms seemed to be the same...at least I think so.

Help? anyone? anyone? Bueller? anyone?

Answer 1

Unfortunately we are having the same problem, but don't know of a solution.

Answer 2

I have come across this issue twice. Both times I was able to fix by uninstalling and re-installing Siteminder Agent and run the Siteminder configuration wizard to register as trusted host with the policy server. You might have to ask your Siteminder Administrator to drop your server as a Trusted host in order to register it again (if you don't do this it will tell you it already exists). Once the configuration wizard finishes, you will notice it adds the wildcard mapping on top of the Coldfusion mapping. For some reason everything goes out of wack when you mess around with these mappings manually from the IIS console. So far this is the only solution I have found. Basically you let the configuration wizard add the mapping. My CF gateways and Siteminder are working again. So try not to mess around with these mappings and make sure they are in the following order:

1. Siteminder SSO
2. Coldfusion

By the way, I'm running CFMX 7 on a Windows 2003 IIS 6 server. So its an issue on MX 7 as well.

Answer 3

Check the setting on the Wildcard ISAPI mapping for the SIteMinder agent. There is a check box for “Verify that file exists”, remove the check and it should start to work.

The Flash Gateway is requesting a URL that is not part of the file system, it is a servlet mapping path. Since there is no file and the SiteMinder agent is checking for its existence you get a 404 error causing the Flash Gateway to fail.