How important is IM? was RE: How important is the PSTN

Mike Lewinski mike at rockynet.com
Sat Jun 29 02:58:10 UTC 2002


> With IRC you can set up an organizational IRC server.  Local users
> connect to it rather than "wild servers."  Set up the IRC server to
> implement appropriate screening for your organization.

I've done just this for a small neighborhood wisp. There are users of
varying skill levels who want to be a part of the noc team. Rather than
creating on important servers, or giving access to routers, for purposes of
diagnosis, I'm using the perl Net::IRC module to build a number of small
bots with very specific functions... e.g. syslog messages and mrtg stats
sent to a noc channel.

The next level will be to write a bot some with interactive access on the
network so a request to 'traceroute x' or 'sh int' can be done by anyone
with channel ops (and everyone present gets the benefit of the ouput if
there's a problem).

Eventually I will tie this into some type of text-to-speech on the client
side, so that critical conditions can be brought to our attention even if
the window is out of focus or we're all afk.

It's not hard to use SSH tunneling / VPN as well, ensuring that the noc
console application can be used securely across untrusted networks.

Mike








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