Still working on my eBay script at the moment. I'm hoping it will make it easier to monitor ebay listings, but it's still in the early development stages at the moment.
Things I have learned whilst doing this - using a constant ("use constant VERBOSE => 1") to conditionally show messages based on a command line switch (using "VERBOSE and print..."); using Config::Simple to load a configuration file.
I've been somewhat distracted though by my new HP Proliant Microserver. It's the kind of machine I've been after for ages - a small server that can replace the various bits and pieces of obsolete old desktop kit that I've used for home servers in the past. The most noticeable difference physically between it and normal home user desktop kit is how easy it is to access the hardware. The motherboard is housed on a tray that simply slides out. There are four drive bays with plastic trays that unclip and slide out. Although it's running a fairly low powered AMD chip, it's still dual core (my first dual core processor - that tells you how behind the times my kit is). It takes up to 8gig of RAM.
On the hardware side, it comes with 1gig of RAM, and for the moment I've added just another 1gig. This leaves it a little low on memory for what I want to use it for, but is all I can afford for the time being. It has 2 DDR3 240 pin slots which does mean that when I can afford to upgrade I'll have to sell my existing RAM. There's a single 160gig SATA disk. I haven't added to this yet, but I'm intending to add another two disks and set up a mirrored RAID fairly soon.
On the software side, I was originally going to run it as a straight FreeBSD amd64 server. But I read an article outlining how this machine met the hardware requirements to run VMware's ESXi, a hypervisor for running virtual machines. This got my interest going, so after chewing it around for a bit I've ended up installing ESXi 4.1. I've already set up a FreeBSD virtual machine to run as my main server, and will be setting up a FreeNAS one shortly.
In short I'm really impressed so far - and enjoying messing with virtual machines. It's disappointing that the primary management tool for the VM's only runs on Windows, but that's quickly solved by setting up another VM with Windows on it, and connecting to it remotely from my FreeBSD netbook using freerdp (which seems to work flawlessly).
Oh, and I'll remember to post further updates about my eBay app...
Things I have learned whilst doing this - using a constant ("use constant VERBOSE => 1") to conditionally show messages based on a command line switch (using "VERBOSE and print..."); using Config::Simple to load a configuration file.
I've been somewhat distracted though by my new HP Proliant Microserver. It's the kind of machine I've been after for ages - a small server that can replace the various bits and pieces of obsolete old desktop kit that I've used for home servers in the past. The most noticeable difference physically between it and normal home user desktop kit is how easy it is to access the hardware. The motherboard is housed on a tray that simply slides out. There are four drive bays with plastic trays that unclip and slide out. Although it's running a fairly low powered AMD chip, it's still dual core (my first dual core processor - that tells you how behind the times my kit is). It takes up to 8gig of RAM.
On the hardware side, it comes with 1gig of RAM, and for the moment I've added just another 1gig. This leaves it a little low on memory for what I want to use it for, but is all I can afford for the time being. It has 2 DDR3 240 pin slots which does mean that when I can afford to upgrade I'll have to sell my existing RAM. There's a single 160gig SATA disk. I haven't added to this yet, but I'm intending to add another two disks and set up a mirrored RAID fairly soon.
On the software side, I was originally going to run it as a straight FreeBSD amd64 server. But I read an article outlining how this machine met the hardware requirements to run VMware's ESXi, a hypervisor for running virtual machines. This got my interest going, so after chewing it around for a bit I've ended up installing ESXi 4.1. I've already set up a FreeBSD virtual machine to run as my main server, and will be setting up a FreeNAS one shortly.
In short I'm really impressed so far - and enjoying messing with virtual machines. It's disappointing that the primary management tool for the VM's only runs on Windows, but that's quickly solved by setting up another VM with Windows on it, and connecting to it remotely from my FreeBSD netbook using freerdp (which seems to work flawlessly).
Oh, and I'll remember to post further updates about my eBay app...
