Project Gatekeeper
December 13, 2006
My bot is finally finished!!!
First of all I want to thank the monks over at Perlmonks.org for helping me get the scraping part working correctly, the people that responded to my pleas for help on the Net::OSCAR mailing list on my many questions with the Perl module, and lastly Adam Pash from Lifehacker for giving me the inspiration to work on this bot.
The purpose of the gatekeeper Perl bot is to be able to tell me what the WAN IP address of my Linksys WRT54G router. This is so that if i am at work or away on business, I can still be able to connect to my home network. As of now this bot will only work with a Linksys WRT54G. I have not tried this with any other linksys routers or any other consumer grade router. You will also need to make sure that you have WWW::Mechanize and Net::OSCAR installed in order for this to work. This has been tested using Activestate Perl on Windows XP SP2. This should work in Linux and under Cygwin no problem. I haven’t had a chance to test it yet.
In order to run it, you can just double click on the script in windows, or run it from the command line. Once the bot connects to the AIM network, all you will need to do is message it with the word “ip” and it will spit back to the WAN IP address of the router for you.
I commented the code so that it will be easy to see what it is doing and to make changes where needed. I am releasing this code under the GPL as is and offer no kind of warranty on it.
December 24th, 2006 at 7:56 am
And for something far less practical, check out my new bot - Meeebot on AIM. An eleven year old and a 14 year old wrote the quips, comebacks, insults, and compliments. It also does some practical things like yours… but I find that most people just end up arguing with it. Too much fun.