We had a requirement of setting up an Apache 2.2 / ColdFusion 8 web server that could have virtual hosts added throughout the day without any disruption to running pages. Initially it looked like an Apache graceful restart would be a fine solution for this. However, what we ended up finding is that any running ColdFusion pages actually received a “JRun Connector Protocol Error” message.
We confirmed that this issue existed by creating a ColdFusion page that outputted a message every second (using CFFLUSH to make it outputted to the screen). While this was running we then ran “kill -SIGUSR1 `cat /var/run/httpd.pid`” and received the following message:
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Server Error
The server encountered an internal error and was unable to complete your request.
JRun Connector Protocol Error.
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It turned out that the solution was to use VirtualDocumentRoot instead of just the plain old DocumentRoot setting for a single virtual host. This allowed specifying the $0 variable as part of the value. So we ended up being able to have “VirtualDocumentRoot /somedir/$1”.
