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The House of Fusion Technical Magazine 		Issue: 16

March 27, 2000
April 2, 2000
This is an opt-in magazine. To join, leave or change subscription mode, please visit the signup page. All content of this magazine is copyright Fusion Authority, Inc. It may not be reproduced without permission.
Community
ColdFusion Tips Plus
What Resources Do YOU Use?
 
News
Allaire Is Back in the (Office) Pool with SuperSLEUTH
Allaire Announces Actuate Technology Partnership
Mercury Interactive Tracks ColdFusion Performance
Allaire Chooses QuickArrow Suite to Help Manage Burgeoning Consulting Load
EBags Uses Allaire as Fulcrum
CyberSeminar: Allaire Platform Launch: Taking Allaire to the Next Level
KnowledgeSynergy Uses ColdFusion Servers to Boost Development Team Productivity
Continuus eAsset Management Framework Integrates ColdFusion
 
Tech and Tags
What's New in the Tag Gallery
Sample Company.mdb for CF 4.5 Allaire Documentation and Examples
Latest Uploads from Allaire
Allaire's 'Top 50' Uploads
Can't Remove 'Allaire FTP and RDS' Icon from HomeSite/Studio 4.5
Simple Version Control in Spectra, Part 2
Using Allaire Spectra Tools in ColdFusion Studio
Creating Allaire Spectra Pages and Containers
Retrieving Long Text from MS SQL Server
 
Views
Who Needs Perl?
 
Reviews
When You Can't Afford a Second Chance...
 
Security
Allaire Security Bulletin (ASB00-06): Patch Available for Allaire Forums 2.0.5 Security Issue
Allaire Security Bulletin (ASB99-11): Solutions to Issues that Allow Users to Execute Commands on NT Servers Through MDAC RDS
 

Community

ColdFusion Tips Plus

This fairly new addition to the ColdFusion Web Ring (Issue 8 was just released) is a solo effort by Nathan Stanford. Along with CF tips, Stanford also offers e-mail help on specific problems.

CFTIPS_Plus Page

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What Resources Do YOU Use?

Michael Dinowitz, our esteemed publisher, notes that Allaire has posted a survey for feedback about their developer resource. It behooves all developers to answer it as truthfully as possible. "One thing to pay special attention to is questions 25 and 26," said Mr. Dinowitz. "Let Allaire know what CF resources YOU use (House of Fusion, Fusion Authority, Defusion, CFNewbie, CFAdvisor, etc.). This will (hopefully) suggest to them that there are a lot of 'third party resources' out there that they should work closer with. This is a survey for ALL Allaire products, so it applies to the JRun and HomeSite communities as well."

The survey asks:
"25 In your opinion, which technical Web site offers the best mix of content and intuitive navigation? (enter valid URL)
"26 Which three technical information Web sites do you access most frequently? (enter valid URL)"

Allaire Developer Survey

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News

Allaire Is Back in the (Office) Pool with SuperSLEUTH

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., March 28 /PRNewswire/ -- Allaire has announced that Infonautics, Inc. has successfully relaunched the Sports Sleuth website (http://www.SportsSLEUTH.com) and its NCAA Basketball office pool contest using Allaire ColdFusion for Linux. Sports Sleuth is an online destination for sports enthusiasts and currently features an online NCAA office pool that allows any group of office mates or friends to create their own customized user group. Allaire also powers the award winning Sleuth Center sites.

Infonautics installed and tested the scalability of the more than 20 Linux servers running ColdFusion. Peak loads of up to 1.7 million page views an hour were recognized during scalability testing with no significant performance degradation.

Allaire Article 15054
Allaire Article 15055
PR News on Yahoo

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Allaire Announces Actuate Technology Partnership

SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO and CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 28, 2000-- Actuate® Corporation and Allaire Corporation have announced a strategic alliance to deliver enhanced Internet solutions to customers. The companies will work together to integrate e.Reporting technology from Actuate with Allaire's ColdFusion Web application server for customers ranging from global 2000 to dot com companies.

Allaire Article
Yahoo Article

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Mercury Interactive Tracks ColdFusion Performance

SUNNYVALE, Calif., March 29 /PRNewswire/ -- Mercury Interactive Corp. Has announced availability of a set of new Web performance monitor add-ins for its load testing solution, LoadRunner®, specifically designed to test and monitor Allaire ColdFusion, BEA WebLogic, BroadVision One-To-One(TM) Enterprise, and SilverStream (Nasdaq: SSSW - news) application servers. These monitors are designed to help optimize website performance by enhancing LoadRunner's ability to verify scalability and identify website performance bottlenecks.

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/000329/ca_mercury_1.html

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Allaire Chooses QuickArrow Suite to Help Manage Burgeoning Consulting Load

AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 30, 2000--Professional Services Automation (PSA) solution developer QuickArrow Inc. has announced that Allaire Corporation has chosen QuickArrow's Enterprise Consulting Suite (ECS), an end-to-end practice management solution that fully leverages the Web's speed and accessibility, "to help manage its fast-growing consulting business, address the administrative challenges that accompany growth and reinforce its already strong customer satisfaction rating."

"QuickArrow ECS is revolutionizing our consulting practice by automating processes and workflow, better utilizing staff and more effectively managing growth -- all through a simple browser," says Kip Bowes, director of consulting services for Allaire. "These factors protect our bottom line while freeing us to focus on customer service, growth and profits." Yahoo Article

Quickarrow Website

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EBags Uses Allaire as Fulcrum

DENVER, March 28 /PRNewswire/ -- eBags.com, the world's largest online retailer of bags and accessories, has incorporated several leading-edge technologies to provide faster, more personalized and more reliable Internet shopping. The team is leveraging Allaire software to create a personalized "store" for each customer by displaying products based on a customer's previous purchases and site-viewing history. ColdFusion also enables eBags.com to automatically send product updates to consumers based on the lifestyle preferences revealed by their shopping habits.

Yahoo Article

PR Newswire Article

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CyberSeminar: Allaire Platform Launch: Taking Allaire to the Next Level

Adam Berrey, Allaire's Director of Product Marketing, presented an on-line seminar for investors on March 6, 2000. Here is the URL to access the taped presentation.

CyberSeminar Link

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KnowledgeSynergy Uses ColdFusion Servers to Boost Development Team Productivity

IRVINE, Calif., April 4 /PRNewswire/ -- Continuus Software Corporation announced at Spring Internet World the release of Continuus KnowledgeSynergy®, a team-based application that enables companies to create, manage, catalogue and re-use knowledge and best practices. KnowledgeSynergy is a knowledge management solution that actively provides development organizations with the ability to dramatically improve team productivity by reducing learning curves, reusing components, processes, and other intellectual capital, and rapidly evolving best practices within their active development projects. KnowledgeSynergy was developed using Coldfusion Server from Allaire Corporation.

Yahoo's PR News

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Continuus eAsset Management Framework Integrates ColdFusion

IRVINE, Calif., April 4 /PRNewswire/ -- Continuus Software Corporation announced at Spring Internet World the launch of the Continuus eAsset Management Framework. The Continuus eAsset Management Framework enables organizations to dramatically, and reliably, accelerate the development, enhancement, deployment and management of software and Internet applications and Web content. Firmly integrated with ColdFusion, the Framework provides a single, integrated approach for managing software and content development lifecycles, as well as the projects, processes and people associated with development.

Yahoo PR News

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Tech and Tags

What's New in the Tag Gallery

IPOAlert
A custom tag that monitors the trading status of pre-IPO companies who have filed but are not yet trading. The tag sends an email or page with the stock's info once it begins trading.
Simple Silent Auction
The Simple Silent Auction can be used for running a simple auction where people can submit bids over the web. Users can submit items for the auction and include a digital photo.
CF_REMOVEHTML
Remove HTML tags from text for formatting purposes.
CF_GetPropDefLabel
Pass in a property definition value and the label will be returned. Good for properties that act like lookup tables.
CF_Roaming_Sessions
Allows Session Variables in a Load Ballanced environment without resorting to "Session Aware Load Balancing," using WDDX packets.
KavaChart Applets
A collection of graphing applets that includes most chart types and can be easily populated with CFM tags.
KavaChart Servlets
A collection of graphing servlets that includes most popular chart styles, including bar, line, pie, time series, etc.
CF_NewsFuse
This custom tag allows you to drop a user-configurable news feed anywhere on your site! With headlines provided by MoreOver (and more headline "packs" coming soon), you have the power to make your site dynamic and interactive, all with one simple tag. It requires no platform-specific objects or controls. If configured to show a channel/feed chooser, it will remember, using CLIENT variables, the choices made by your users the next time they return! It utilizes our freeware tag, CF_RSS2CF, to convert the RSS feeds into usable CF structures!
CF_FileInput
This tag creates client-side JavaScript to validate aspects of an input type = "file" field such as whether it is required and allowing only certain file extensions to be uploaded.
Spectra Extensions
This ZIP file contains two tags that extend the Spectra ObjectPackager and ObjectInstaller tags installed with Allaire Spectra. It saves both the object type information, and the object type data, thus making it easy to transfer content objects between databases, without migrating all the data.

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Sample Company.mdb for CF 4.5 Allaire Documentation and Examples

The Allaire documentation for CF Server/Studio 4.5 and up implies that a database, "company.mdb" is included with CF Server and CF Studio, but it is not. This URL leads to a sample "company.mdb" available via download link.

Sample Company.mdb for CF 4.5 Allaire Documentation and Examples

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Latest Uploads from Allaire

Allaire has posted a list of the latest additions to their website.

Uploads Page

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Allaire's 'Top 50' Uploads

Allaire has posted the top 50 uploads requested by developers in March.

Top 50 Uploads List

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Can't Remove 'Allaire FTP and RDS' Icon from HomeSite/Studio 4.5

When uninstalling HomeSite or Studio 4.5, you may find you cannot remove the icon giving access to FTP and RDS from within HomeSite/Studio. This URL offers a workaround.

Can't Remove 'Allaire FTP and RDS' Icon from HomeSite/Studio 4.5

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Simple Version Control in Spectra, Part 2

Raymond Camden gives us the second installment of his article on simple version control in an Allaire Spectra content object type. He builds on the work done in part 1 by designing the two handlers not discussed previously, teaser and display, which reveal information about the previous versions of the article being tracked.

Simple Version Control in Spectra, Part 2

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Using Allaire Spectra Tools in ColdFusion Studio

Learn how to use Allaire Spectra toolbar features to program applications, pages, and handlers from within ColdFusion Studio.

Using Allaire Spectra Tools in ColdFusion Studio

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Creating Allaire Spectra Pages and Containers

Robert Crooks gives us another excellent article on Spectra, this time concentrating on how to create pages and content object containers.

Creating Allaire Spectra Pages and Containers

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Retrieving Long Text from MS SQL Server

Problem: You get the following error trying to retrieve long text fields from a MS SQL Server database:

"Stop code error ntoskernal.exe **_KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED**"

Solution: Check your settings for the DataSources option in the ColdFusion Administrator. If you have enabled the retrieval of long text, this error message is probably the result of a bug in MS SQL Server. You need to apply Service Pack 2 to MS SQL Server to solve the problem.

Retrieving Long Text from MS SQL Server

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Views

Who Needs Perl?

by Howard Owens

I just read an article by Ben Forta recently on the subject of WHEN NOT TO USE Cold Fusion (in the most recent CFDJ, I believe).

Good advice.

If you know another language to program in.

I imagine a lot of CFers are like me. We're really not programmers.

I know just enough Perl to be able to pretty much read a script and understand in general terms what the script is supposed to do. But ask me to write anything beyond "Hello, World" and I'm lost.

I'm pretty jazzed at getting CF to perform some acts today that I previously tried and failed on with Perl.

What I'm doing is parsing a directory of directories. Each directory contains a file that mimics the directory's name with an .shtml extension. Those files are menus for all of the pages in each directory. What I need to do is write the contents of all of those menu files to a directory where they will become includes on a master index page for the site. This function needs to be run daily. The first part, finding the files and writing them to another directory, was pretty trivial. The hard part of getting my chops around a RegEx that would change the file paths from same-directory relatives to absolute paths (each one different for each section of the site -- we're talking 30 directories on a daily basis, each with a different absolute file path).

It took me a couple of hours, but I got it figured out.

So now I'm over the hump on writing this application.

I just wanted to say, "CF rocks."

"Real" programmers may have a more expansive choice of programming languages to help them chose just the right tool for a particular job, but I'm becoming more convinced every day -- as my CF skills grow -- that there probably isn't much of anything you can't do in CF. It just takes a little imagination and determination.

(Originally posted to the CF-Community list. Thank you, Howard.)

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Reviews

When You Can't Afford a Second Chance...

'A Review of NSI Software's Double-Take Mirror/Replication/Failover Software'

Part II

by John Cesta

In the second part of this review, John Cesta discusses some of the features of the Double-Take Mirror/Replication/Failover solution. See the previous issue of this News Alert for Part I of this article:

Failover...

Let's regress for a moment and quickly review a basic concept. Since both the source and target are on the same network, they cannot contain the same IP numbers. If they did, there would be a conflict in the TCP/IP protocol and both servers would come to a screeching halt. But, if the target is going to assume the duties of the source (in our case the target becomes the IIS4.0 Web server) it must contain the same IP numbers as the source. So, how does Double-Take accomplish this? That's the key question we asked. Here's the answer:

When defining a server as a target, Double-Take asks how many IP place holders you require. Let's say your webserver is serving 20 sites and all are IP-bound. The answer to the question would then be 20 place holders. What Double-Take does now is diabolical. In the Advanced tab portion of Network > Protocols > TCP/IP, DT writes 20 place holders in the form:

This clever manipulation fools NT into accepting the fact that there are 20 IP numbers in the NIC card. When it's time for the target machine to go into failover mode, DT replaces the place holder values of 0.0.0.0 with the real IP numbers from the source machine.

The configuration setup for the target's Failover mode is performed through a GUI called the Failover Control Center. Some of the options presented are:

In Add Monitor, after selecting the source machine you wish to monitor, a graphical display shows the source machine and its IP numbers. You then select the IP numbers you wish to monitor and set the criteria for failover. You may:

  1. Set the monitor interval in seconds (how often a signal is sent to check the source)
  2. Choose when to trigger failover (i.e., When all monitored IP numbers fail, or when one monitored IP fails)
  3. Perform failover of: (1) Monitored IP numbers or (2) All IP numbers
  4. Set the failover server name and shares

Other Failover options include Pre and Post failover scripts. (After the failover process, you may need to restart DNS, Web services, and run some bat files.) The entire failover process depends on how many IP numbers you need to failover. If you provide, for example, IP-Less hosting and your IP numbers don't exceed, say 10, it will take less than two minutes for the target machine to completely assume the duties of the source. A blink of an eye.

A typical failover scenario...

  1. The source fails, the target senses this and assumes the duties of the source.
  2. The source is removed from the network and repaired.
  3. When the source is ready to go back into service, clicking the failback button on the target instructs the target to set its IP numbers back to the 0.0.0.0 format and assume its original identity.
  4. When the target is ready, it prompts if you would like to continue monitoring the source. Connect the source to the network (plug it back into the hub) and the target assumes its role as failover monitor. The data the target has amassed during its role as source may then be mirrored to the source. Or, before you reconnect the source you may restore the data manually. It's very clean and simple.

Mirroring and Replication...

The server designated as the source is the heart of the mirroring and replication process. In the GUI Management Console you define replication sets, as many as required. By clicking on the source machine icon, and opening up a Windows Explorer metaphor, you select which directories or files you want to synchronize to the target machine. You have the option of syncing data All-To-One (All the directories and files selected on the source will be copied to one directory on the target) or One-To-One (Each directory or file selected on the source will be copied to that same location on the target). If the target machine will be configured to monitor and failover the source server -- such is the case of failing over a webserver -- One-to-One is the option you would use.

Double-Take can be configured to automatically remirror on a disconnect. Mirroring options include:

  1. Full mirror: Each time the source and target connect a Full Mirror will be performed.
  2. File differences: Files are compared on source and target and copied to target only if different.  Important NOTE: The File Differences option, while less bandwidth intensive, does not delete files on the target which are no longer on the source. This makes the file differences option almost impossible to use for anything but databases.

The data which has been selected for replication is initially stored in a queue on the source. Double-Take creates a configurable pagefile on the hard disk to assist with this. When an application creates, deletes, or modifies data on the source machine, the file requests are filtered by the Double-Take file system driver. After the data is written to the source disk, Double-Take converts the file request into replication packets. The Double-Take source then sends the packets, which are identified by the replication sets, to the target.

Bandwidth throttling...

DT allows you to limit the bandwidth it uses during data transmission. Your options are straightforward. You may specify the percentage of bandwidth to be used of the total bandwidth capacity available (i.e., 75 % of T1, or, 20% of 100mbs). The total bandwidth options range from 28.8kbs to 1 Gigabyte.

Security...

Double-Take offers multilevel security using native O/S-provided security features.

The Text client...

Double-Take includes a full blown text client which features all the functions of the GUI interface in a scripting language. Included are over 70 commands. Here's a short example of a Double-Take script that will start a Double-Take connection by creating a replication set named Exchange and connecting to the machine Thor. The script also sets up failover :
These commands may also be run from the DOS command line.

What's So Great About It?

  • Relatively low cost of entry and administration
  • Very easy to implement
  • Works in addition to your existing configuration rather than designing your system around it
  • Works in almost any network configuration and with almost any application
What Needs Improvement!

  • Text client needs tighter integration with the GUI Console (i.e., if a logon session is created in the text client, it should be seen upon launching the GUI Console ... Currently, it isn't.
  • In order to reconnect a previously disconnected replication set, all the parameters must be re-entered. It seems as though these parameters could be saved as the default set.
  • There is not much, really, that Double-Take doesn't provide. And, the new 3.1 version -- I've been told by tech-support -- has much better performance.
A small- to medium-size hosting company not experiencing a huge demand in traffic, and therefore not requiring a load balancing configuration, will benefit immensely from using Double-Take for data mirroring, replication, monitor and failover. A hosting company that does require a load balancing configuration can use Double-Take as an additional data backup solution. Also, we use Double-Take in our development labs to mirror/replicate, monitor, and failover our development machines. We're happy!

For more information about Double-Take, you can visit NSI's website at http://www.nsisoftware.com/, or email John Cesta, the reviewer.

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Security

Allaire Security Bulletin (ASB00-06): Patch Available for Allaire Forums 2.0.5 Security Issue

Allaire Forums 2.0.5 software may allow users to view and post to secure discussion threads via unsecured conferences and/or through email. This issue affects multiple templates in the Forums software. Updated versions of the affected templates are available from the included link.

We had hoped to have the full review of this security problem, done by Cameron Childress, out before Allaire's announcement. Cameron has been VERY busy, and hasn't been able to finish his review yet, but you can look forward to it in a future issue of Fusion Authority. It will cover this and other forums holes that have been found.

Allaire Security Bulletin (ASB00-06)

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Allaire Security Bulletin (ASB99-11): Solutions to Issues that Allow Users to Execute Commands on NT Servers Through MDAC RDS

Some Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC) could allow unauthorized access to a web server hosted on Microsoft Windows NT. This updated article shows how Allaire customers running on Windows NT can take steps to protect themselves from this vulnerability.

Allaire Security Bulletin (ASB99-11)

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This is an opt-in magazine. To join, leave or change subscription mode, please visit the signup page. All content of this magazine is copyright Fusion Authority, Inc. It may not be reproduced without permission.