I had earlier tried that, when I do this:

my $trick_my_box_script;
my $base_path = '/home/hesco/sandbox/EC2';
my $build_script = 'build_server.sh';
open('USER_DATA','<',"$base_path/$build_script") or die "Unable to ope
+n $base_path/$build_script: $! \n";
while(<USER_DATA>){ $trick_my_box_script .= $_; }
close(USER_DATA);
my $user_data = encode_base64($trick_my_box_script);
[download]

hesco@marcus8:~/sandbox/EC2$ time perl ec2_faxserver.pl
$VAR1 = bless( {
      'errors' => [
         bless( {
      'message' => '500 read failed: Connection reset by peer',
         'code' => 'HTTP POST FAILURE'
                 }, 'Net::Amazon::EC2::Error' )
               ],
  'request_id' => 'N/A'
 }, 'Net::Amazon::EC2::Errors' );
[download]

-- Hugh