The Mysterious Spy.log – Coldfusion & JDBCSpy
January 18, 2012 3 Comments
A couple of week ago, I found a file on my internal web server called spy.log, which gave me a bit of a scare (but then I realized nobody spying on me is likely to call a file spy.log) This file was almost 20G in size. What’s up with that? After finding a viewer to open a 20G text file, I determined that this was a legitimate file belonging to JDBCSpy, which is an extension of the Coldfusion JDBC driver which can optionally be enabled. To enable it, you just have to add a reference to the Coldfusion Datasource Connection String in the Advanced section.
SpyAttributes=(log=(file)C:\\temp\\spy.log;logTName=yes;timestamp=yes)
Thing is I don’t remember enabling it. I found some more information on Charlie Areharts’ blog which reminded me that at one point I had installed a demo version of Fusion Reactor to diagnose some performance issues. I’m not sure if the version of FR I installed modified the connection string and did not remove it when I uninstalled the program, or if I added it (note to self: make better changelog notes please).
In any case, the fix was simple, delete the connection string attribute and restart the CF services.
Sid's FishNet 
Hey Jay, I know this is an old post, but I came across it today after seeing another great post from you. In the case of this one, you wonder if FR may have enabled that jdbcspy option. I can say definitely not. As I discuss in that blog entry (you kindly linked to), it’s an option one can enable in CF yourself, but it’s not something FR does or ever did, I can say for sure.
Hope that’s helpful.
Thanks for clarifying that. I’m sure I must have enabled that when I installed it. And thanks for the comments today. I can’t say I’d ever expected to see a comment on my blog from one of the best known Coldfusion-eers 🙂
Thanks for your kind regards. It was a pleasure finding your blog (when I was searching for info on httpBl and CF). Of course, there have traditionally been so many that it’s easy to miss many of them. I did look over all your other past CF posts, and found this one which led me to comment on it. I do realize your CF posts are diminishing of course, but hey, that’s the way it is these days, with nearly everyone seeming to blog a lot less in general. Anyway, keep up the good work as you can. 🙂
/charlie