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When enabled, the PingPlotter Pro web interface allows access to many of the options of the PingPlotter client, but without having to be local on the machine that is collecting information.

Enabling the web interface using the built-in web server

The easiest way to try out the web interface is to go to Edit -> Options, Web Server section, then turn on the web server.  Leave the port at 7464.  For local testing, turn off the checkmark for "Use Security".  Hit "OK" on the options dialog, applying the changes and closing it.

Just to make things easy, let's trace to a target from the main user interface.  Pick one of your favorite targets from the history in "Address to Trace" and start tracing.

Accessing the web interface from your local machine

To access the web interface from your local machine, enter this URL in your browser (or, if you're accessing this from online help, just click on this link):

http://localhost:7464

This should open your browser to the PingPlotter web interface, which lists all the current targets and allows you to pick one (from the list on the left) to see for details.

You can trace to a new target, stop and start an existing trace session, close an existing session, change trace intervals and do basic examination of the data.

Doing basic analysis

There are some basic operations you can do from the web interface, but some things require the local client.  Here are some of the operations you can do.

• Change the length of time you're examining on the time graph.  There is a combo box below the graph that lets you pick a different time.
• Change "Samples to include" to look at a bigger or smaller time window in the trace graph.
• Turn on or off a time graph for any hop.  To do this, right-click on the hop (Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox only), or double-click on a hop number (IE, Firefox and Opera).
• Download sample data for more analysis with a local instance of PingPlotter
• Do whois lookups through www.whois.sc.
• Add / Remove columns (IE/Firefox only)
• Change column widths

Browser Requirements

Most of these operations require Javascript be enabled.  We've done pretty in depth testing on Internet Explorer 6, Firefox 1.03 and higher and Opera 8.5.  If you don't have javascript enabled, you'll still be able to do a little bit, but you'll be working against an image of the graph rather than a locally drawn version (so you won't be able to do a lot of things like turning on time graphs or resizing columns).

Using Microsoft IIS instead of the built-in web server

Using the built in web server is really easy, and it works great for basic use, but it doesn't have some of the options that using a more industrial strength web server does.  Here are some of the reasons you might want to use IIS:

• You need more than one login (you can use IIS to set up additional logins)
• You want to customize the web interface and use server variables (the list of server variables in the built-in server is pretty close to non-existant, including, currently the ability to get the IP Address of the person connected).
• You want to customize the web interface with cookies and/or session variables.
• You want to use a web server with known issues
• You want to share a web server with other applications
• Others...

The PingPlotter web server emulates an ASP-based VBScript IIS server, so the exact same source files can be used for both.  These source files are installed in the following location (if you use the default path):

c:\program files\PingPlotter Pro\www

If you create a new IIS application and point it to this directory, it should work.  The default page is called "Default.asp", which should work without special configurations when you point IIS at this directory.

For best results, PingPlotter Pro should be running as a service.  There are security implications (COM object security) that bite us if we don't use a service.

We have had some reports of people needing to open up DCOMConfig and change some of the security options to make things work.  If you have problems with this, let us know.

You shouldn't be required to make any changes to any .asp files.

We will certainly find more information about what works and doesn't work here on some machines, so feel free to contact us if you have any questions or problems - support@pingplotter.com.

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