[ultramancool]

Having a botnet with all your servers really isn't a bad idea. I mean, easy admin access, live monitoring, the ability to query everything and have all interested ops people examine the output... pretty handy. Seems like it'd beat a lot of these monitoring services and tools people pay for these days.

[dmihal]

Do you mean having a bot? I can't see how having a botnet would be relevant or helpful.

[ultramancool]

No, I'm referring to a botnet. In the OP case we've got just a single bot which controls things, I'm more thinking 1 bot per server sort of thing so you can administer individual servers simply by directing messages at them.

Server goes down? You see it quit on IRC or send an alert message nickalerting relevant admins when a service halts. Need live information on just about anything, just direct a message to a given server. Could even direct logs to a separate IRC channel for each type of service, relevant admins can join and set alerts up just based on message content and keep track of small logs via IRC logging too.

You can make a lot of low visibility processes very visible using such a setup. Of course, it wouldn't be appropriate for a giant company, but for a small to medium sized one I think it could work quite well. For devops types who are already comfortable with IRC at least.

[Vendan]

check out https://github.com/andyleap/srvbot. Still needs to do real time handling, but you can run commands on multiple servers and optionally receive output

[Vendan]

well, logging is now handled, so that's fun :)

[jon-wood]

It may not be malicious, but its definitely a botnet, especially given most botnets tend to use IRC for command and control.