Process Roulette

This started as a throw-away tweet: https://twitter.com/jamis/status/808779302468665344 . Only I couldn't stop thinking about it...and then I needed a project to start experimenting with atom and Rubocop... and the next thing I knew, I was working on this.

It's still a work-in-progress, and is not guaranteed to work, and is most definitely not guaranteed to be safe. (I mean, heck, the whole point of this is to randomly kill processes on your machine. Use with extreme caution!)

Overview

There are three components to process roulette:

• The croupier. This is a supervisor that oversees the game. Start it running on some machine (preferably one that will not be used during the roulette game). The players and controllers will connect to the croupier, which will referee the game.
• The player. Each player should be running in a virtual machine (or, at the very least, on a box that you absolutely despise). Do not run this process on any machine that you care about! It's job is to connect to the croupier service, and then (when the croupier gives the "go" signal) proceed to whack random processes until the machine crashes. You have been warned.
• The controller. Each controller should be running somewhere far away from the players. They connect to the croupier service, and are used to control the game. The controller says "go", and "exit", and the controller is told the results of the game. If you begin a controller without a password, it is considered a spectator, allowed to watch the bout and see the results, but not to control it in any way.

Running a game

First, install process-roulette:

$ gem install process-roulette

Then, start the croupier service.

$ croupier -p <port> <password>

Then, start players, controllers and spectators.

$ roulette-ctl host:port password
$ roulette-ctl host:port
$ sudo roulette-player username@host:port

Note that the player must be run as the superuser, otherwise it won't be able to whack the really important processes!

When everyone is joined, one of the controllers issues the "GO" command, and the rest happens automatically!

License

This software is made available under the terms of the MIT license. (See the LICENSE file for full details.)

Author

This software is written by Jamis Buck (jamis@jamisbuck.org).