A little background: I get these ideas once in a while that eventually come to fruition after a couple months of brainstorming and tinkering. I’ve had the idea for a while of having a central way to maintain my fleet of Linux servers I host along with Windows if possible. In the past, I used ssh keys to login and run updates. It worked pretty well but I’d like a way to remotely run and/or monitor these. Enter IRC…
Fast forward to this week and I finally got something done that I’ve struggled in the past with: Build a working IRC server for myself and a few friends to access. I ended up using (Link: here) . The set up was painless and running in a basic mode using a fresh Ubuntu VM in about 15 minutes.
Then I got bored. Boredom led to tinkering with Bash on Windows 10. This led to building a Perl script to connect and pull/post updates to an IRC channel. This led to making a bot which can handle some commands like below:
Alright, cool, I made a really simple bot. Now for the fun stuff.
After a couple “adult beverages”, I thought to myself: I wonder if I could actually execute scripts or commands from this? Turns out, it’s pretty simple:
Using a DBI module to connect and pull my devices from my home brew monitoring system and responding accordingly. If a device or five is done, it’ll respond with that information. I’m geeking out more than words can explain, but very excited on this.
For now, the IRC server will remain internal to prevent abuse/spam, but I will most likely be opening it up down the road for more general usage. I’ve got a LOT of ideas for this and can’t wait to keep tinkering. As always, cheers!