Multiple machine folding

Does anyone else think that it would be useful to be able to ask all machines under your control to give their current status from wherever you happen to be?

I've been thinking of building in some client-server code to talk to a control application to retrieve progress information from any machine which has been configured.

It only seems as though it will be somewhat difficult as I've got to create a chat client anyway for class. I've dealt with a lot of inter-systems communication--just not using Java.

As far as back doors, I've never even created one for myself, even for debugging. My philosophy doesn't allow escape routes.

I'm thinking that each client needs some basic setup information:

IP address of the server
port to establish initial communication
description of location

The server would only need to match the port for initial communication to talk.