Hi,

Just out of curiosity. Are any of you running Slackware on production machines (desktops, servers, workstations)?

I regularly come across various discussions where Slackware is sneered at as a "hobbyist" distribution. Now I can't help feeling lightly offended, given the fact I'm basing my small company's server and desktop configurations on Slackware.

Please no flamewar on the matter. Just a simple stand-up-and-be-counted. And a simple description (for example "LAN for small company, 5 desktops" or "root server, company's web & mail server").

Cheers,

Niki

OpenFire employee chat server.

Honestly, though...

I think you're inflating the number of people who sneer at Slackware as a "hobbyist" distribution. There's only one really prominent one.

Okay, how about DNS/DHCP/NTP for a large University network, with a five-figure number of clients ?

Production application for a client which runs 24/7.

Fully Encrypted RAID server for FTP accessed by client with FileZilla using TLS. The box also runs
VirtualBox with a guest MSWIN7 running an application-specific service.

Until last year the previous FTP server incarnation of this server ran with 2 older boxes (from years 1999 & 2000, new disk drives however) and a separate MSWINXP machine. The Slackware box ran for about about 3 years and NEVER had a failure hardware or software. I usually had to shut them down about every 6 months for a short while to move them or electrical power work in that area.

Of course now that I've mentioned how well it runs I can expect a power supply to blow up tonight.

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Previously I set up a separate Slack box to be a firewall with 5 Ethernet connections in a mission critical setup for a warehouse/shipping company. It had a backup in case of failure and it did experience a power supply failure once over the several years it ran. Never a software problem.

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In the past I've tried to introduce a Linux desktop environment (Ubuntu, Slackware, Mint) but it was an uphill battle. Now the furthest I'll go is to suggest LibreOffice/OpenOffice on a MSWIN O/S. I just stick with the server side of things these days.

At The Sausalito Group, we had six servers and one workstation running Slackware by the end of my 3.25-year employment.

Hardpoint Intelligence used three servers and one workstation running Slackware, but that company went out of business.

I have a notion for a startup which may or may not get off the ground. If it does, it will be using Slackware for its servers. Will update this thread if anything comes of it.

Yes, my company has used slackware for both desktop and server duties in recent years. Served us well.

I work at a small engineering company doing embedded software development and use Slackware as my primary workstation. My boss doesn't mind what we run as long as we get work done so I've got slackware 14 with a windows 7 virtualbox for some proprietary IDE's. Works great

Currently running a gateway firewall/Samba server to an intranet of 10 real Windows workstations and one virtual Windows workstation.
It used to be three servers, until a location change allowed a consolidation.

never mind - thought better of it ...
but yeah - we're using slackware

We run 5 Slackware file servers, a FreeBSD datacenter and network resource management server, one Windows Server 2012 active directory server, and 1 Gentoo based Testbed.

That's been the policy of my employers as well. IMO it is very important to have a development machine with the same environment as the production platform, so I've only had the luxury of running Slackware on my workstation when there was another machine available to serve as a development machine. At Discovery Mining that meant running CentOS on my workstation, and at Cyan it was Ubuntu.

I always bring my own laptop to the office, though, and that has always run Slackware.

At Cyan I tried using VirtualBox, thinking I could use a virtual Ubuntu instance for development, but it suffered from longevity trouble. Been meaning to try it again with KVM.

The main production servers at my work are Solaris - and Slackware probably still matches that pretty well - certainly more so that the new fancy things with systemd and the like. We use 2 Slackware boxes to run our databases backup servers - each have over 13 TB of raid-10 disk. This is then disk-to-disk backup of Microsoft-SQL-Server and Sybase (on Solaris). We backup over 2 TB nightly, which is then compressed or deduplicated and sent to a remote DR machine (also Slackware), from whence they are automagically loaded into waiting database servers. A combination of full, differential and log shipping is employed. The biggest of those Slackware boxes has 32 GB ram and 24 cpu's. And boy, does it cook :-)

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Working here for a company that is is in the top 50 of largest companies in the world.
Also we have slackware servers for multiple purposes.

Recently I had to install a Linux workstation for the French Oceanographic Research Institute, and they had the same configuration on a high-end Dell Precision workstation. Felt like moving from a Volkswagen Beetle to a Space Shuttle.

Thanks everybody for your numerous answers!

I found a trick for that, and it works quite well. When installing a Linux server for a Windows network, I usually suggest to clients, if they're interested, to install one Linux client, either in addition or in replacement of a Windows client, and do some basic training for one voluntary employee. That's it. Install it, train the user, wait a few weeks or a few months, and sooner or later they call back and now everybody wants one.