Coldfusion 7 MX cannot understand oracle sometimes

Like every Monday,  I came into work today and got a complaint about our portal’s coldfusion business application not working.  The coldfusion applications were built on Coldfusion 7 MX and the backend was Oracle 11g. The exception on the portal look as below:

Portal Exception
The Coldfusion Exception

After 30 minutes of troubleshooting, I went into the coldfusion admin page and noticed that when verifying the oracle connection it gave an “Internal error: Net8 protocol error” message. Later on googling a bit, I understood from this forum post that the exception was because coldfusion 7 MX was unable to understand the “password about to expire” signals from oracle for the user that coldfusion uses to connect to oracle. So we reset the password for that user in the oracle database using the alter command and the problem was fixed.

Thanks to Google and the posted solution this production issue was solved within an hour.


Fix to show the hidden content behind the overflow scrollbar in Internet Explorer

One of my web applications at work was having an issue of displaying the content completely in the internet explorer.

We had our coldfusion fusebox applications embeded into a PHP template and I had the style set to display only the horizonal overflow scrollbar i.e. “overflow:auto; overflow-y:hidden” . This works fine with Firefox but when we open the same in Internet explorer we have an issue. The scrollbar hides some content behind the itself.

The solution to this problem in IE, as mentioned in the referenced link, is to add around 20 pixels of padding at the bottom of the page.

This fixed my problem and works like a charm. Hope this helps others too. Thank you to the guy who wrote the referred link.