Non-Malicious Botnet?

[The Power Company]

Hey guys,

I was wondering what the best/most efficient way to get multiple devices to act in unison, as a botnet would, but without malicious intentions, as a botnet wouldn't. Would the best choice be to use some cloud platform like Apache Mesos or Docker sort of application? Amazon Web Services maybe? Would designing an actual botnet make any sense? Anyone have any experience with this sort of thing?

[Dave-ee Jones]

On 3/18/2018 at 9:07 AM, The Power Company said:

I was wondering what the best/most efficient way to get multiple devices to act in unison, as a botnet would, but without malicious intentions, as a botnet wouldn't.

What intentions are you intending the botnet's intentions to be?

[barry99705]

Renderman had this cool idea back in the oughts to use the linksys wrt54g exploits to find other exploitable wrt's on the internet and patch them, then use them in the same botnet to continue the purge of bad firmware.  I think the idea was after a few months the c&c server would send out a command to have them reset their ssl keys to break them out of the botnet.  As far as I know no one ever tried it.

[The Power Company]

12 hours ago, Dave-ee Jones said:

What intentions are you intending the botnet's intentions to be?

Perhaps botnet isn't the correct terminology, but I have a few old laptops sitting around unused. I was thinking that if you were running a program that handles some multi-threaded task and carries out processing methods on a large dataset, you could have a centralized system to keep track of overall progress, assigning the next item in the dataset to be processed as soon as one of the PCs finishes its current task.

[Dave-ee Jones]

8 hours ago, The Power Company said:

Perhaps botnet isn't the correct terminology, but I have a few old laptops sitting around unused. I was thinking that if you were running a program that handles some multi-threaded task and carries out processing methods on a large dataset, you could have a centralized system to keep track of overall progress, assigning the next item in the dataset to be processed as soon as one of the PCs finishes its current task.

That sounds all well and good, and quite ideal, but what kind of tasks would they be doing? I'm just thinking in terms of a practical situation. It'd be nice to play around with but what tasks would you push out? How would they share all the information into one "database"?