I'm looking for some service server that is extremely simple and lightweight. It's supposed to be used by administration scripts or simple apps to query for information that is available only as root on other server.

I don't need high-throughput, stateful processing, etc. Only blocking, synchronous queries required. Preferably no HTTP server. I'd be happy with something that takes a number of strings as an input and outputs a string over the network. Any data serialisation can be done in the client if required, so that only opaque strings are passed.

Is there any project like that already available? Bindings for perl and python would be a bonus.