What does it do?
A simple browser plugin to help you bid/snipe on ebay with esniper. A simple right click sets up your bid for an eBay item and records the relevant data to a text file (to be used with esniper later) saving time cutting and pasting etc...
Every few months eBay will change its page layout and the esniper plugin has problems. When you see a new version simply uninstall old esniper plugin (addons in browser) and install new plugin by clicking link above.
What's a Network 'Blackhole Folder' and how do I set one up on my server?
Its simply a shared directory - which your linux server watches.
When you drop a file in (eg; your bid file), your server will know, and can use it!
1st. You will have to set up this shared directory ; here I explain how to do this using SAMBA.
1st: Setup a shared directory for your network (via samba etc..) I have set mine to '/media/hdd/esniper' you want to set yours to something relivent to you.
eg;
nano etc/samba/smb.conf
add
[esniper]
path = /media/hdd/esniper
comment=esniper Share
browsable=yes
public=yes
writable=yes
guest ok=yes
mkdir /media/hdd/esniper
mkdir /media/hdd/esniper/sniped
#set up a subdirectory in this shared directory called sniped
/etc/init.d/samba restart
2nd: crontab -e
and add the following line to your crontab - remember to change the directory in bold to your shared directory path.
#watch the esniper directory every min to see if a new esniper file has been added to snipe on
#change /media/hdd/esniper to your linux directory path for you shared sniper directory
* * * * * bash /media/hdd/esniper/dirdrop.sh
3rd: We create the dirdrop.sh script file which is run every minute (by cron). This looks for *.txt files and sets up esniper to bid with them. It also moves them into a directory called 'sniped' when they have been processed. Cut and paste the below script in a text editor and change the bits in bold to match your directory path to your network shared eSniper directory.
nano /media/hdd/esniper/dirdrop.sh
and then copy and paste the below (changing the bold to your esniper directory share)
#------------------------------------------------------------------------
#!/bin/bash
#echo "Executing dirdrop"
shopt -s nullglob
for file in /media/hdd/esniper/*.txt do
echo "$file" to be processed
mv "$file" "$file".done #rename the file so no other instance processes it
/usr/bin/esniper -c /media/hdd/esniper/.esniper "$file".done
wait
mv "$file".done /media/hdd/esniper/sniped/
done
exit 0
#----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Name this file 'dirdrop.sh' and drop it into your shared esniper directory. Make sure its executable by;
chmod +x dirdrop.sh
This script will now run on your remote server every minute. This means you have no worries about logging into linux and editing files, calling eSniper etc... you simply set up your bid by cutting and pasting into a .txt file and copy the file into the network share from any computer.
What's eSniper?
eSniper is a free program on sourceforge - for eBay bidding - its is a always on demon - a program running in the background which you set up to bid last second on eBay. which can bid down to 5 seconds, and rarely makes mistakes. It uses hardly any resources - very useful - because you can run it on all sorts of linux devices - which thanks to ARM processors popping up everywhere can be a small low powered linux home server, a linux partition on your laptop, a linux NAS or even a linux router.