Managing a Botnet
The key to managing an army of webbots is to do it from a central point or, in other words, to create what is known as a botnet. You may have heard of the term botnet in the popular press, and the connotations were probably not good, as botnets are often used to deliver spyware, spam, viruses, and other malicious payloads. While bad guys use botnets to do bad things, there is also much to learn from botnets in terms of managing distributed software. In the right context, botnets are a convenient way to manage distributed webbots.
The techniques that apply to managing botnets apply whether your webbots all run on one computer (as shown in Figure 25-5) or on multiple computers located in your office, in the cloud, or on a series ...
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