Creating hosts file entries allows you to create DNS aliases which can be very handy for web development. If your on a Mac, you will notice that it has the /etc/hosts file just like other unix os's.

One problem I kept running into however was that OS X was caching my host entries.

I needed to do a reverse lookup on some IP addresses in a database today. I found that you can do this pretty easily with java, and just as easily with ColdFusion. Here it is:

<cfset inet_address = CreateObject("java", "java.net.

I am happy to announce the latest creation from foundeo: fusionKit.

fusionKit is a CD full of some handy ColdFusion components and UDF's. It is a similar concept to the DRK's that Macromedia used to sell, but is it's 100% ColdFusion.

It has been a while since I've posted one of these java + cfml tricks, so here's a neat one for ya'.

You can use the Java Naming and Directory Interface (JNDI) to perform a DNS query in ColdFusion.

The first domain I ever bought, many years ago has been registered with Network Solutions, it was first registered with Internic, which handed things over to Network Solutions.

Here's a handy site for system administrators, and other such people: dnsstuff.com. It has several web based dns and ip lookup tools. One handy one is the ISP cached dns lookup. This is handy for testing round robin dns, and also to see when your dns changes take effect, here's a lookup of www.