11 March 2012

Perl, CVS and more!

Ever since I've learned perl I've been finding more and more uses for everyday automated tasks. It's actually a ridiculously useful language and I'm incredibly happy that I've learned it. Yesterday I wrote a program that updates a php script that with the latest external IP address of my home server. It also updates the time that the IP address was updated and then some logic is performed server side to determine whether or not the server is online at the time of a page request.

This means that when ever I would like to access my server at home remotely, due to the fact that my ISP assigns an IP address dynamically, I can always have the latest IP (within 15 minutes) to connect to and I will always know if the server is on or not. This is not only handy for having access to a home computer at all times but it means I always have access to my cvs server remotely as well.

I set up a CVS server partly because I wanted to test out the package manager on fedora 16, partly because I wanted a back up of all of the projects in my eclipse workspace on my laptop and mostly because I wanted to become more familiar with using CVS. I've now some hands on experience not only updating my CVS server with a bunch of my old projects, but I plan to get some experience out of this managing the CVS server from an administrative perspective

Oh, and Fedora is awesome too!