To make system administration a snap, we have used the UnderNet IRC daemon and the sirc Perl/C IRC client by 'orabidoo' (roger...@pobox.com).

We had agents (in Perl of course) talking to the programs and systems under management that were able to collect data and chat on the central server using sirc. Each machine had its own channel and each agent had its own handle. The agents were also able to recognize sysadmins and commands that they issues (over IRC) and executed them on the systems they monitored.

Administrating the system thereforward, feels like having actual conversations with the systems. This is specially advantageous when we need to get multiple admins together to administer and control a large set of servers.

Additional features that we had included were 'scribes' that would take down the conversation for archiving and were intelligent enough to recognize commands that activated and deactivated them. They were also able to play back a command stream (allowing us to simply ask a scribe to shutdown all our pvm machines in the correct order for example). These scribes also worked to share data amongst channels by retransmitting messages on other channels.

It introduces quite a bit of fun into the task of administrating our systems. Yes, it has gotten to be a serious security issue, and we have had to create a separate secure environment within our already firewalled network for this. But you have to admit, it is pretty cool to be able to chat with your machines.

-- termix