As my Dear Readers you may be aware (If you recall back to the Jibber Jabber posts). We at the Insane Asylum have switched to a uniform IM chat system that we now all use for inter communication between padded cells. Which is much simpler that the days when some were on MSN, some Skype, and the old skool ones still on ICQ.

Now one of the reasons we switched was because the Asylums Governor liked the throw away joke suggestion of putting all our servers onto IM, so we could talk to them, and they could let us know when they experienced problems. And our Support droids could access basic Linux commands while using their preferred Micro$oft OS’s. That will teach me to watch what I say in jest. (It probably won’t).

So, I now have to make this happen. Well it beats working on Phone systems for a change. And I feel I need a challenge every now and again, or my Mind starts wandering into dangerous areas. Since I have this blog, I figured where better to log my progress, so I can read where I am up to when I get distracted with another project.

Phase 1:
I have a basic IM bot running on one of our servers to use for testing. It has rudimentary commands so far, basically traceroute, host, nslookup, and several ones that result in it insulting the person talking to it ;0)

Phase 2:
I want to get some basic help commands on there, so people can work out how to use it better, Its one thing adding fancy commands to its list if people can not work the simple ones out. So help commands, and a simple config file I can use so I only have one small thing to change depending on what server its running on. (humm. Get it to load file based on hostname then one file will do all).

Right. Off to work.