Episode: 760
Title: HPR0760: /dev/Rob0 of maintainer of the SlackBuilds.org mailing list
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0760/hpr0760.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 02:01:11

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Hi everyone, this is Pat too. I am at the South Houston Express sitting here with Rob.
I know Rob Zero in IRC, is that what generally would you go by?
Rob McGee.
Rob McGee.
How did you become a dev? What happened there? Is that like a howl, a hiccup or something?
In 19, I believe it was 99 and I was a slackwear beginner. I was posting on the slackwear forms
when Pat had the web forms at the time. I was posting as just playing Rob and well some
other, just playing Rob kind of robbed me of that.
And so it just seemed like a cute little way to be distinct.
Yeah, exactly. Cool. So this year at South Houston Express, is this your first South
Houston Express?
Yes it is.
Okay, so this year you are giving a presentation actually on Post-Fix and what like spam
control?
Right. Post-screen is what Dr. Venima calls a triage demon which protects the real SMTP
demon from the hundreds and thousands of spam zombies that are constantly bombarding us.
So Post-Fix first of all is a male server?
Correct.
A male transfer agent.
A male transfer agent, okay. And so this would be something, you don't have to be running
your own male server to take advantage of what you're going to be talking about or actually
I think that I doubt it would have a whole lot of interest for people who don't.
Because this isn't stuff, this isn't who's or front ends like spam assassins.
Not at all.
This is more like...
Not at all. But it might make you think twice about what you're doing with spam assassins.
Okay, all right, interesting.
So who would want to, who is this talk aimed at like advanced users?
Yeah, male administrators, primarily administrators.
System administrators who, considering taking on male hosting for themselves.
Gotcha, okay.
So what do you do in the real world, are you?
Oh my goodness.
I am so desperately unemployed at the moment.
Oh, nice, okay.
I've been doing a few interviews and trying to find employment, but it's not easy in my
field.
I haven't been working in the IT world recently.
And where did you get all this knowledge, just, I mean, obviously right now.
Well, I've been the postmaster for Slack builds.
And I've been doing that for a few years back in, I guess, in 2005, while I was working
as a IT, I was working for an IT consultant and also picking up some jobs on my own.
I took on hosting for a heavily spammed, very small business domain with only two real
users, but well over 95% of what they got was spammed, wow, that's crazy.
And I, frankly, for geek type people, it's usually not that big of a problem because
we're careful about making sure our email addresses don't get harvested.
Those of us who have the ability to do so run, use tagged email addresses so that what
we give out in one place is going to be, that address is going to identify who it's
given to.
And then if we find that it's getting spammed, we can shut it off.
Well, anyway, these people hadn't been very careful at all and did not know what they
were doing.
But within a week, I had them down to probably 5% spam instead of 95%.
Which did an amazing amount of improvement of the productivity of the perceptionist
in that business.
And then within a couple of weeks, I think I had it down to probably 1%.
Cool.
Okay, so we're talking about email.
What's your male user age in a choice?
Personally, I've been using mutt-lake, I love it.
It can do anything, but it takes a little more work to set it out.
I do, I have used K-mailer in the past.
And I do, frankly, I do like having a gooey for my male because I might start a reply on
something and think, oh, I want to go back and look at this other message, well, in my,
that's not easy to do.
Yeah, you have to quit.
Then you postpone this message, yes.
And then you go back.
Yeah, I don't know what you mean.
So what about, like, on broader subject, away from the talk itself?
You're a Slackware guy, or you're obviously the Ministry of Slackware.
I started in Slackware and yeah, what's the story?
99 or 98, I don't remember exactly when that was.
And I was fortunate to be starting on a computer that was not very good for running Linux,
even.
It was a 386 with an RLL controller, hard drive controller, if you familiar with those.
Prior to IDE and the Linux kernel does support those, but you have to know that's what you
need.
Because it's a brand new beginner, I didn't have any online help to turn to.
So I worked pretty hard to try a red hat that I got from a book.
And then I looked at Zip Slack, which was only 30 megabytes, which I could probably download
that on my 14-4 modem in maybe eight hours or so, if I can get my wife to stay offline
for that amount of time.
So that's what I did.
I downloaded Zip Slack, and it's not supposed to be unzipped from a 16-bit DOS, but I managed
to do that anyway.
Oh, cool.
Nice.
It broke something.
Accidentally, or?
Well, I ran into errors trying to unzip it, but I figured out how to work around those
errors.
And the files that had passed it in too long, it just wasn't able to do that, which turned
out to be most of the pearl package, and it didn't really hurt me, because I wasn't going
to do anything with pearl on Zip Slack anyway.
And while I tried to beat the Zip Slack and found I ran into the same issue I had with
a red hat that it just wasn't booted.
Well, then I got the idea, swap out hardware, and when I put in a real IDE controller,
suddenly, it worked.
And later, around December of 99, my Windows computer went belly up, and since then I've
been strictly on Linux, and almost all that time has been slapped.
If you count SLAMD 64, which I did for a short time, then it's been pretty much all
slapped.
And SLAMD, of course, was the 64-bit version of the port of Slackware unofficial at the
time.
Right.
Yeah.
Why Slackware do you think is it a big philosophical thing, or are you just comfortable
there?
Or are you just like what?
I was lucky.
Yes, I'm a perfect Slackware user.
It worked perfectly for me, but I was just lucky that I happened to stumble onto that.
That's right.
Yeah.
But now that I understand things better, I wouldn't change.
Yeah.
Cool.
May need it.
Well, thanks for all your work on Slackwolds.
I mean, that's...
Thank you for your support, and...
Yeah.
So, thanks a lot for the interview, and I guess we're headed off to the sports bar or something
for our pre-party, so 299.
299.
So, I'll see you over there.
Okay.
Thanks a lot.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
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