Episode: 503
Title: HPR0503: Quvmoh talks to Clint Tinsley about SLAMPP
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0503/hpr0503.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 21:54:04

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The
Oh, this is Kube Moe for Hacker Public Radio. Today we're talking to Clint Tinsley, one
of the maintainers for SLAMP, the simple solution for home server. Clint, thank you for
being here today. You're welcome. Now before we get started with SLAMP, how did you get
into this computers and Linux and what not? Oh, I've been working with Linux since 1993. I think
it was when I first started back with the Red Hat 51 and so she six O's, you know, bought
the retail box for a number of years when they were still selling the retail box. So it's
been part of, you know, it's been out there and I've used it in my work and that sort of
thing. And that's how I got started with Linux in particular. I'm a network engineer
by trade. So I do that, you know, as the advantage of being open source and free to use
as long as you know how to use it. And so I've used it for a number of server implementations
over the years and that sort of thing. Do you run across it on a forum or how did you
find SLAMP? I found SLAMP on, I watched just for watch quite closely and it kind of popped
up at about the end of July and it was a completely self-contained DVD solution and provided
a complete home server platform plus many other server services and a desktop that was
complete with open office and all the programming utilities you could ever want to support
Ruby, PHP, Postgres, MySQL. And in the final that and one self-contained DVD that's live
that you could also configure was impressing right off the bat. So I downloaded it and started
playing with it. Oh, that's great. Now, how did you end up being part of the project?
Well, when I first downloaded which was version 2.0, I found a number of minor problems with
it and I got a hold of the person, you know, the founder and developer and maintainer of the
distribution and he was pretty responsive and I gave him the thing that I found, you know,
that were kind of broken in the 2L release and August 12, he had a 2.0.1 that fixed the major
problems which was the Grub boot or the Lalo boot screen didn't exist and would fail when you
installed it to a hard drive and there were little things that we fixed in that and then going
forward, he kind of turned the project over to me and by the end of September I had a new release
pretty well done before we went down to the Utah open source conference and did a presentation
there at the birth of the feather conference. It was pretty much ready to go at that point and
I fixed a number of things. I added PHP and Postgres administration tools to the distribution,
fix the little web gallery, a number of launcher icons that were broken and fixed and it
helps us also fix in that particular release and that brought us up to 2.0.2 which is the current
release of Slamp. Great, what do you expect to see in the near future for Slamp? The Slamp is
based on 12.2 Slackware and Zenlock 6.2 actually might be older than that, 6.x version of Zenlock.
It was actually built on Zenlock which is built on Slackware because it took advantage of the Zenlock
utilities. Well as it is it's on 12.2, 13 has been out for some time now from Slackware. Zenlock,
they had a following out with some of their community people who split off and have to start
at their own distribution. So we need to refocus where we're going with this and number one
get it up to Slackware 13.0 for the base, for the code base and then determine what we can do
in terms of some of the nice utilities from Zenlock that made Slamp such a nice
easy to maintain products that things like Zendo and the Zen installer and some of the scripts
that came over from the Zenlock distribution. That made it easy to maintain the packages themselves.
So it's a need of some significant updates and the only thing I'd like to see going forward is
to set it up as a gateway server so that if you put this product in your home which is where it's
really designed for you can actually have a server's your gateway to your network. So it serves
the routing function as well and firewall and plus having all these other things put on there.
Going forward it's fairly dated at this point since it's based on Slackware 12.2 and an early
version of Zenlock 6.0, 6.1 I forget which but anyway 13.0 and Slackware has been out for
some time so we really need to make some updates to bring it up to current. There's a lot of
improvements in the new version of Slackware and then we also took advantage of Zenlock utilities
such as an installer and Zendo and some other scripts that have been updated since that time.
So we need to move that forward and it basically means rebuilding the distribution from scratch
since you just can't update Slackware to the next release very easily and then also I want to be
able to add the gateway function to it so it can actually serve as a router as a home router
and then firewall for your network as well. It's got a firewall itself but that only protects
the system it's running on. If the gateway configuration is built then you'd have to network
interfaces just like a router and be able to use it in that capacity as well. So now if you get all
this integrated you're going to be able to have one spare box with two cars in it that's going to
be able to handle protecting your your internal network plus being a server for you to handle your
media and your normally that but it's a it's a web server it's a database server. I mean you
can still you know have it out facing to the internet and use it for web server.
The possibilities that was the first thing I'd impress me with with Slack is you have all this
collection of tools not only the server components but the desktop components and the programming
components. I mean it supports just about everything you want to do in programs including net
beams and Java and PHP Ruby you know it's all in there and it's just a really nice collection of
different applications and packages to build whatever it is you need to do and it makes a great
test development environment because of that and then throwing an open office on top of that
and a lightweight desktop with XFCE it it just really rocks that's all I can say.
Now you you've had this actually running in a commercial or a production yeah my last position
with this one of the local companies I was actually using it is one of our support servers
for our internal network and I actually put Nagios on it to use the monitoring configured
Nagios to do server monitoring with it as well and they use the web server and the database
components and it was a very and it was set there and ran. Wow didn't touch it still running
today I suspect. Is there anything we haven't talked about that you'd like to let everybody
know about this project? I'll check out the distribution if you have suggestions we're always
open to suggestions for improvements looking for people to help out as well. Yeah we can always
use help I mean there's only a couple of us that really you know spend a lot of time on this
distribution but it's been downloaded two two has been downloaded 1400 times or something like
that. Wow since it was released at the end of October and the 201 was downloaded around 3000 times.
The 201 was okay there was just some other things that I saw that were either missing or broken
that I fixed in a 202 release plus I updated all the helpments there wasn't a lot of documentation
when it was first released and so I went in and added a number of sections to the to the help area
the tips and tricks on how to do things with using slamp. So it sounds like the more people who use it
the more feedback you get the better it's going to be. Absolutely you're not going to run into everything
with all those tools. No it's going to have a different use for it. Right and I think that was the
case when I started out with it is I found things that were kind of in there but they didn't work
and being on the post-pressed side and PHP I needed certain tools to work so I incorporated those fixes to make them work.
Now I've purposely avoided it because I'm going to mess it up but the gentleman who actually started this project
do you know his name? Camus Antonius. Yes. And he's where? He's an Indonesian.
Okay and he's got a neat blog out there he says he has himself off his kind of a normal guy he's
the he's an engineer actually and works on the oil fields. Oh wow. And he's involved in a
complete different technology there but he started this project back in 2005 I believe or 2006
with the one dot release and then kind of cooked for a while and then all of a sudden it came back
to life and the tool release and since then we've had the original release plus two maintenance releases.
And so the next step is to move to the psychware 13 and hopefully a 30. Great and I think it's
wonderful that you know in this in this community we really can in this day and age come together
around the globe you know there is no distances. You know you could be talking to Antonius you know
tonight and there is no barrier. Right so we could get out there and try new things and work with
people and get things done. Yes. Well thank you so much for being in here today and hopefully a
lot of people will check out SLAMP and get you some feedback. All right. That's S-L-A-M-P-P-P-E.
Two P's not two amps. That gets confused quite a bit I've seen. Thank you so much. You're welcome.
Thank you for listening to Half Republic Radio. HPR is sponsored by Carol.net so head on over to