At the time we decided to add a looking glass script to maxnoc.com, we were unable to find any open source coldfusion script that'll perform this functionality.

The cfx tags we found for traceroute and ping were out dated. We weren't able to run them on CF MX Platform. The other problem was using CFEXECUTE with CFFLUSH. We weren't able to use these two tags together properly. Making the user wait 40 secs for a traceroute to a broken host is not wise at all, and this is usually why you run the traceroute. Anyway, we were able to find a workaround to this problem. MaxNOC Looking Glass script is creating a Java Object to execute ping and traceroute commands which can be used together with CFFLUSH.

MaxNOC Coldfusion Looking Glass component includes Ping, FastPing, Traceroute, Dig, Nslookup, Whois methods. You will need the following command line utilities in order to run lg.cfc. All copyrights belong to their respective owners.

• Windows Port for DIG > http://members.shaw.ca/nicholas.fong/dig/
• GNU_JWHOIS Client > http://www.gnu.org/software/jwhois/jwhois.html
• Fast PING Client > http://www.kwakkelflap.com/fping.html
• FTRACE Traceroute Client > http://www.r1ch.net/stuff/ftrace/

Installation is easy, simply unzip the contents of lg.zip to your webserver folder and update the executable paths if necessary. We assume you have a folder structure like the one shown below:

Of course, if you have a similar folder structure (where you have executables under your web folder) make sure you REMOVE ALL PERMISSIONS to dig, ftrace, and jwhois folders. Either do this, or put the executables outside your website folder and update the paths in the lg.cfc file (this is the recommended practice for a production enviroment).

http://localhost/lg/lg.cfc?method=ping&parameter=google.com http://localhost/lg/lg.cfc?method=fastping&parameter=google.com http://localhost/lg/lg.cfc?method=trace&parameter=google.com http://localhost/lg/lg.cfc?method=dig&parameter=google.com http://localhost/lg/lg.cfc?method=nslookup&parameter=google.com http://localhost/lg/lg.cfc?method=whois&parameter=google.com

If you would like to see the component in action, please go to:
http://www.maxnoc.com/support/looking_glass.html

If you would like to download just the component source code:
http://www.maxnoc.com/downloads/lg.zip

If you would like to download the source code and the utilities:
http://www.maxnoc.com/downloads/lg_everything.zip

We have tested the executables included in lg_everything.zip with the latest version of NOD32 as of August-16-2008, however it never hurts to run another antivirus scan on the files. Once again, all copyrights belong to their respective owners.

MaxNOC's Coldfusion Looking Glass script is released under the GNU License:
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html