Episode: 470
Title: HPR0470: Interworx
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0470/hpr0470.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 21:12:16

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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.