Heavy Wizardry 101

PART IIITHROUGH THE NETWORK: CASTING CRAWLERS

To cast is to command—to send forth the unseen, weaving silent threads that bind and spread beyond the eye.

—The Book of the Wandering Sigil

With what we’ve covered in the previous chapters, we’re now ready to write and deploy our own worm (or, if you prefer, mobile agent system). In the process, we’ll draw on some of the components we developed earlier in the book. This is a much bigger project than we’ve worked on so far, so we’ll break it up across the remaining chapters. It’s an opportunity to apply a lot of what you’ve learned and see how to develop a more complex system with several interacting parts.

In Chapter 8, we’ll set up the infrastructure and write a simple two-stage worm in C. ...