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I recently built out a simple single task application for a call center and decided it would be a great use case to install Lucee as the ColdFusion engine.  The Lucee windows installer comes bundled with an IIS connection script, but no option to connect Apache. Here is what is needed to get it running.

The recommended method for locking down Vicidial is to allow only whitelisted ip addresses access through the firewall. 

However, the call center I contract for has a lot of "at home" agents with dynamic IP addresses. Updating the whitelist manually became a difficult task as more agents with dynamic IP addresses came online. They needed a way to automate the process of updating the whitelist on the pfSense firewall in real time. I investigated several options, and decided that creating my own solution was the best route. 

In order to create a real time dynamic ip whitelist solution for a client I needed to be able to SSH into a pfSense fiewall using ColdFusion and kick off a few .sh files to update the firewall's ip whitelist. ColdFusion dosen't have the ability to ssh directly, but by using <cfexecute>, Putty and Plink you can get the job done.

When making a request from Internet Explorer 10 the initial page would load without issue. Any subsequent request would hang. Once the server was hung the site was also unreachable from any other browser on any other platform.

Recently I have been researching the latest SEO techniques to make sure I was following best practices when  building applications for my clients that could benefit from SEO. A big component of SEO stresses the importance of search engine safe (SES) urls.

In a nutshell, SES urls present the URL string in a format that is considered "clean" to both human and search engine bots that index your pages. It is widely believed that Google does not deeply index dynamic URLs using the standard query string format like this;