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hpr_transcripts/hpr0470.txt

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+Episode: 470
+Title: HPR0470: Interworx
+Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0470/hpr0470.mp3
+Transcribed: 2025-10-07 21:12:16
+
+---
+
+This is Quack 2. I'm at the Ohio Linux Fest and sitting at a coffee shop in the convention
+center with John from Interworks. Interworks are interworks.
+Interworks. Okay, so what is interworks? Interworks is a browser-based control panel for hosting
+web servers. It allows you to easily manage your servers, manage your configuration files,
+settings, etc. as well as add domains, email accounts for those domains, FTP accounts,
+various other things. Okay, so for someone who doesn't ever do anything with servers like me,
+what does all, so if I set up a server and I need to add a set of users maybe, is that what I
+would be doing with interworks? Right, we make it all easy through a nice web-based interface,
+so somebody with absolutely no knowledge of how Linux works other than I add a user and I
+be able to connect to it, they can do that all through interworks pretty easily. This sounds a
+little bit to my limited knowledge. Again, I don't really do a whole lot of server stuff. Sounds
+like something I would find on C-panel or something like that. Is that, is it similar to that? C-panel
+is actually one of our competitors. They were one of the earlier people to do the web-based control
+panel for servers in terms of growth and things like that. They've massively outgrown us, but
+interworks started first as an internal project at nexus.net up in Dearborn, Michigan, and then it
+eventually spun off into a separate product when we realized that the market, well, when they
+realized that wasn't part of the team then, when they realized that the market was big enough for it,
+we kind of specialize more on the fact that we're small as kind of one of our strengths because if
+you have a problem, have a feature request, file a support ticket, and you email somebody,
+you're getting a software engineer, you're not getting some salesperson, some support person,
+or somebody who's over in Bangalore who's just answering phones. We're trying to have very
+kind of, that was a word for natural growth as opposed to just a huge marketing push,
+and we grow too big too fast. Cool. Okay, cool. So what do you do? Are you a salesperson or what are
+you? I'm a software engineer at Interworks. I was, I'm the, presently, the third software engineer
+at Interworks. We're a small team of only three developers, and we have a few other support staff
+and things like that, but it's mostly the team of the three of us. And this is a commercial company,
+right? Yes, yes, this is a commercial company. We estimate 15,000 installations of interworks worldwide,
+but because it's optional, whether you inform us that you installed it or not, we're not entirely
+sure how many active lights we have, but we know it's at least 15,000. Interworks as a whole
+has been around since about 2003 when we first launched, and yet we're, it's a very mature code
+base. We're fairly stable. Most of our support tickets are more based on, I'm using some strange
+configuration, and I just want to make sure everything's going to work as opposed to this button
+stopped working. So we just released Interworks 4, which was a massive rewrite. We redesigned everything
+for, we fixed a lot of the areas of the system that were broken and slow. It's much more
+sensible, and we have a full API where the actual web view of Interworks is a client of the API.
+So anything you can do in the web, you can do through our API. The third version was released,
+I think two years ago, there were rumors going around that Interworks development was dead,
+because there are a lot of, there were only minor bug fixes released, but the reason for that was
+that we were just developing this massive rewrite, and we kind of, we're trying to go under the radar
+with it until release day. Wow, very close. So when was 4 released? Interworks 4 was released. Oh,
+geez, it was during post-incond 2009. It was actually the first day of post-incond.
+We, we put Interworks 4 live, and people were able to download it and install it. We had
+handful of installs by, you know, before even the official announcement on the website,
+it was sold. So if I, if me personally, I got a server, I'm going to set it up. I want to use
+Interworks for my control panel or whatever. Is that realistic for one person to try to use it,
+or is this like something for big companies? Absolutely, it's realistic. We offer a single domain
+license for free, and that is good forever. It allows you to install Interworks on your machine and
+have one domain point into it. It makes managing it fairly easy, as long as you're running a red hat
+based distribution of Linux, it everything works fine. Most of our customers use CentOS,
+they're a few that use red hat enterprise, and some more adventurous use Fedora.
+Cool, okay. And then you'll scale up to like the scope of, I don't know, are you allowed to tell
+me some of the, you know, the companies that I might know that are using Interworks?
+I'm not sure I'm allowed to specifically give any publicly, but I will say that there are very
+large companies that are running Interworks for their websites, and they're also hosting companies
+out there who are running hundreds of accounts on a single, big server running Interworks,
+and it all scales fine. Wow, okay. Well, that is very cool. In terms of, like, I guess you'd
+be called expandability or extensibility or whatever, I mean, is this some, can I write my own
+modules for Interworks and like plug it in or something? Presently, you cannot, but we just released
+a new feature that allows a, we just built a plug-in architecture for adding our one-stop support
+to Interworks, which is a backup solution. So we're planning on writing more plug-ins as we need
+them, and down the line a bit, we're probably going to open up the plug-in API so that anybody can
+write their own plug-ins. Very cool. And what was it, what was it written in? Interworks was written
+in PHP and MySQL. It ships as a kind of packaged product, so you don't have to install Apache or MySQL
+or anything. It's all just a single installer. We run our own internal instances, and you're also
+free to use whatever versions of software you want. If you want to run some older version of PHP
+for security reasons, you're perfectly welcome to. Cool. That's what I was going to ask next, actually.
+Yeah. And the same with MySQL. We recommend Apache 2.2 or higher. There's some people that are
+that may be using old versions. We're not entirely sure. When you say that you're not entirely
+sure, like what, so people can install it, oh, you mean like the single domain people can install
+it and then not report that they've installed it to you, right? Yeah, we can check the licensing
+database, but we often don't because there's some licenses out there. People who bought servers
+who aren't really using them in a real environment, there's even a test lab or something. Yeah, yeah.
+So we're not entirely sure in terms of active license. What's the website? So Interworks,
+INTRWORX.com, and you can find all your information on there. We have a decently active message board
+and pretty good documentation. Cool. I will check it out. Thanks a lot, John, for talking to me.
+Thanks for having me. Thank you for listening to Active Public Radio.
+HPR is sponsored by Carol.net. She'll head on over to C-A-R-O dot N-E-T for all of her students.