ColdFusion .dbm files

[tmparsley]

I need help, I know very little about ColdFusion.

I have a question: We had a programmer develop a ColdFusion application for
us. We stopped using it about a year ago and have decided to go back to it. I
have uploaded it to our server (a Coldfusion server). All the .cfm files load
no problem for the user. But any file ending in .dbm causes a "page cannot be
displayed" error.

I have check out macromedia's site and found the following article:

[url]http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=tn_18289[/url]

I've sent this article off to our hosting company and I am told that this fix
will probably solve the problem, but they would want to move with "extreme
caution" in making a change like this and would like me to explore any other
avenues possible before making the change.

So my question(s) is this:
1 - Can somebody explain to me (in non-techy language) what the error is, what
is the purpose of a .dbm file and why this application won't run properly.
2 - Why does the host want to move with "extreme caution" before making a
change like this?

Thanks so much for your help!
Tina

[paross1]

Since .dbm was the old ColdFusion extension before .cfm, I wonder how hard it
would be for you to convert these templates to .cfm? Do you have many of them?
You might take a look (or have someone else take a look) to see if there is
anything in them that would prevent you from renaming them, and any links to
them, with the .cfm extension. I suppose that you could change them to .cfm on
a test server, and run Code Analyzer on them to see if they contain any old
depricated stuff, etc. That way, you will never have to worry about the issue
again, and all of your templaes will now have the proper valid extension.

Phil

[Sojovi]

Following the instructions of the article you only enable to IIS and CF to
process files with extension .dbm. Is not something dangerous itself, just only
enabling another file extension to be processed by CF (configuring IIS, and
saying ".dbm file must be processed with CF).
The only thing is that you should not allow (at least beware of) file uploads
with .dbm extension because they are executable after the IIS and CF config
modifications, and some malicious user could exploit it.

Regards

About your questions :
1) The error is because dbm are not allowed to be executed as webpages. Dbm
files are an old extension for CF files. The application should run properly
except for obsolete or deprecated CF tags or attributes not supported by your
actual CF server version.
2) They said that because they don't want to open a security hole in their
servers, they prefer live in peace, why they have to take a risk (is not the
case) doing all those changes for a stupid CF application ;-)

Regards