The shell account I use, offers 2 as standard, but I also purchase a 3rd bg process.
Though, in my case, protection roles are only placed on one bot. The others have many other tasks to perform, including a lookup database, centralised logging of the botnet, triggers and debuging.
In these situations, more than one process is needed. you can't allways use 1 process. A second is needed for testing purposes.
Though in genral, people that tend to run 5 from one shell, call them self |337 and protected are the fools the shell admins advertised for.
Is it a good idea to run bots from diff servers?... I use 1 account with 3bg for 1 bot channel protectin and as ppslim stated one for trivia etc.... I also have another account with 2 bg which I use as second protection bot....I always thought if they were on diff servers(shells) this was a good idea?....
with regards to having a stable botnet (on a network without services) i see no point in running more than one bot per box. the only good thing about having many from the same is the strength in numbers if someone attempts to massdeop. but after the arrival of chanfix (efnet specific) it isnt as important anymore.
i also hate the way it looks if a shell is attacked and a third of the botnet dies
but ofcourse, if you write your own scripts etc, a testing bot/net is desireable. im fortunate enough to have a couple *nix boxes sitting on my private network to test on.
All your bots should be on seperate boxes, which have connection suppplied by different feeds, where the power supply for one, isn't fed from the same power supply of another.
Get the picture.
Examples
1: 5 bots on one machine. Simple, skiddiez will ddos the shell box, all 5 gone.
2: 5 bots of seperate machines at one provider. In most cases, all fed via the same link. Skizzies ddos again, saturating the link, causing full loss of service for the 5 bots.
3: 5 bots, in either of the above 2 situations. Power goes down. 5 bots lost once battery and generator power is lost.
DOn't suppose you get the picture.
You seperate the bots accross the net, in much the same way, software providers provide FTP access from mirrors. They distibute them, so that speeds and access is better.
In bots, it may be a case, that a 1/2 second advantage of detecting a flood, is the advantage you need to stop you losing a channel.
My Eggs are never in the same basket When we had that situation a short time back where Foonet was knocked out as well as other providers I lost only about 50% of my botnet. The rest of em stayed in complete control.
I have one account with 4 BG's and one of em is offline hub ... and he runs smooth as glass with no problems ... he has yet to have any issues
The key is speading the bots out everywhere. Dont be afraid to ask the providers where their provider is ....
"Knowledge is Power"
BeastNH/Moonster on Undernet/EFnet IRC Network