Installing ColdFusion / JRun on a Dell Server Gotcha

I’m currently working on setting-up a two-tiered clustered environment on some brand spanking new Dell servers running Windows Server 2003, and ran into a little problem which I’m sure will creep up for other people. I installed ColdFusion MX 7.0 in multi-server mode, got an instance of it all configured, but could not get to the JRun Administrator.

I checked the JRun logs and apparently port 8000 (which is what the JRun Administrator uses) was already in use. To see what was using port 8000, I used trusty netstat from the command line:

netstat -a -n -o > c:\ports.txt

This command with basically lists all ports and IP’s which are bound, the process ID which they are bound to, and pipes it all into a text file to make it easier to read. From there I saw the following entry:

TCP 0.0.0.0:8000 0.0.0.0:0 LISTENING 1848

This told me that process 1848 was binding port 8000. I ran the Windows Task Manager (”taskmgr” at the command line), turned on the display of Process Id’s on in the Options, and found that a process named omaws32.exe was bound to that port.

After Googling for that process name, apparently it’s related to the Dell Open Management server. After talking to one of our sys admins about this (because I’d never ran into this problem before on any other Dell servers), apparently Dell had switched to using this port for their Open Management software recently rather than having to run it through IIS. This is according to him at least– I didn’t research it myself.

Being that I don’t need to use the JRun Admin that often, I just decided to bind it to a different port and call it good. You can do this by editing the XML attribute:

<attribute name="port">8000</attribute>

Located in the file:
%JRunHome%\servers\admin\SERVER-INF\jrun.xml

I changed the port to 8350, restarted the JRun Admin Service, and it was good to go. Hopefully this will be of some help to someone else who runs into the same problem.