Hi,
We discussed a bit yesterday in #mediawiki some features of toolserver and their availability on labs in the future, I know that wikimedia labs are still not being used for application hosting (wikipedia bots etc.) so I think that it would be cool to expand this discussion also to this mailing list.
I started a list of "wanted features" as Sumanah asked me for here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMF_Projects/Wikimedia_Labs/Toolserver_feature... so please insert some other requested stuff there if you think that something is missing (I am pretty sure there are many things which I forgot to mention).
I have absolutely no clue how this part of labs is going to be designed but I think that having several instances shared between bot operators (similar fashion as current toolserver is designed) with shared storage for /home between servers would make sense. Having separate instance for each bot operator would IMHO eat too much system resources (bots need just few mb of ram, os needs hundreds), maybe some more complicated bots could have own dedicated instance if there were needs to have some system customizations.
Concerning features, I told Ryan yesterday that most of users would probably appreciate to have possibility to at least forward system mail to their own e-mail boxes (atm most of accounts on toolserver have their mail forwarded to account owner e-mail), however Ryan told me that there are some security implications so I don't know if this could be possible in future.
Another thing I forgot to mention was that toolserver application servers allow users to access directly their own www folder, so that bots can produce some output which can be accessed from outside (example: http://toolserver.org/~petrb/logs) this could be also problem because virtual servers don't have public ip, so maybe it would be cool if we had some public www server which would be connected to same storage as /home folders of those application instances (probably accessible directly from wmflabs.org).
Any ideas? Thanks!