PROBLEM:

When starting ColdFusion for the first time connector wizard cannot configure web server correctly.

Starting ColdFusion 8...
The ColdFusion 8 server is starting up and will be available shortly.
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Running the ColdFusion 8 connector wizard
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Configuring the web server connector (Launched on the first run of the ColdFusion 8 start script)
Running apache connector wizard...
ColdFusion 8 not started, will retry connector 12 more time(s)
ColdFusion 8 not started, will retry connector 11 more time(s)
ColdFusion 8 not started, will retry connector 10 more time(s)
ColdFusion 8 not started, will retry connector 9 more time(s)
ColdFusion 8 not started, will retry connector 8 more time(s)
ColdFusion 8 not started, will retry connector 7 more time(s)
ColdFusion 8 not started, will retry connector 6 more time(s)
ColdFusion 8 not started, will retry connector 5 more time(s)
ColdFusion 8 not started, will retry connector 4 more time(s)
ColdFusion 8 not started, will retry connector 3 more time(s)
ColdFusion 8 not started, will retry connector 2 more time(s)
ColdFusion 8 not started, will retry connector 1 more time(s)
The connector wizard has not been able to contact the local ColdFusion 8, connector installation aborted.
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ColdFusion 8 has been started.
ColdFusion 8 will write logs to /opt/coldfusion8/logs/cfserver.log
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java.net.UnknownHostException: foo.mydomain.com: foo.mydomain.com

05/06 07:59:07 info Macromedia JRun 4.0 (Build 108487)
05/06 07:59:08 error Could not connect to any JRun/ColdFusion servers on host localhost.
Possible causes:
o Server not running
  -Start Macromedia JRun4 or ColdFusion 8 server
o Server running
  -JNDI listen port in jndi.properties blocked by TCP/IP filtering or firewall
   on server
  -host restriction in security.properties blocking communication with server

CAUSE:

This behavior could be caused by using non-resolvable host name (foo.mydomain.com in our example) along with /etc/hosts file having incorrect permissions.

[root@foo ~]# ls -la /etc/hosts
-rw-r-----  1 root root 1514 May  4 18:04 /etc/hosts

SOLUTION:

To resolve this issue /etc/hosts has to have 0644 access permission:

[root@foo ~]# chmod 0644 /etc/hosts
[root@foo ~]# ls -la /etc/hosts
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 1514 May  4 18:04 /etc/hosts

On distributions with BlueQuartz (Strongbolt, BlueOnyx, etc) it could be caused by /usr/sausalito/handlers/nuonce/fixhosts/fixhosts script (see this post). To prevent this script from resetting permissions again, add the following line at the end of the script:

/bin/chmod 0644 /etc/hosts