Please excuse a tale here... For a long time I've always installed cf updates on the cmd line, after bad experiences w updates in the admin UI hanging or going south w very little useful into about what went wrong. Recently, on another server, I had an issue that led me to use the cf 2021 admin tools to revert an individual package to an earlier version, and that worked very well, no problems. I had a different server that I'd previously reverted to its original state, update 2, because of problems with a later update, and I wanted to update it to U11. So, silly me, I thought, well that downgrade using the admin was pretty slick, very easy, I'll try doing that the easy, standard way, with the admin UI. That hung, saying service restarted (not exact wording), over and over in the progress dlg, for a really really long time, and eventually I stopped it. Now accessing the server throws a 500, logs say "Unable to install License package: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com/fasterxml/jackson/core/JsonProcessingException", and "Unable to install Cryptograpic package: java.lang.NullPointerException" etc. So now what? Uninstall cf and start over? Shame to waste all the config and testing that's been done, but this seems like a poisoned well, unless someone's got a cool magic trick. Bail?

That error looks sooooo familiar...

Hopefully you took a snapshot of the server before you did anything?

Not right before, no, and our sysadmins don't like to keep machine images around too long. I've asked what's available, no response yet.

@Dave Merrill - Once again - you and I share something in common (a borked update from inside the admin). Virtually the same thing - long time saying "Shuuting down the service" - finally stopped the service myself - the CF was completely borked. I ended up uninstalling CF and then reinstalling.

Sadly no, there's no applicable snapshot of that server. My bad, I suppose I should have prepared for the worst, if not exactly expected it, exactly. It's a future server I'm prepping, so it's not getting backed up like servers that are in service. Bleh. Did I mention that?

As an "extra" idea.... you can save your settings using CommandBox and treat the settings like a source-code file and keep them in version control. (Or save the lucee-server.xml - if you dont want to use CommandBox/CFConfig) Then you can blow away a server as often as you like and ALWAYS have the configuration at hand/

That's basically what I do with the CAR files in ACF