Clark Connect - Anyone Using it?

Found this interesting thread Clark Connect - Anyone Using it? over at Whirlpool.net.au

A few of the posts stood out and caught my attention and got me thinking:

From KeeWEE:

SME has my vote

Why?

I like SME too, as far as it goes, but am trying to add a RADIUS server and MySQL accounting to it. However in SME both come preconfigured for its server functions so adding further configuration means you have to 'reverse engineer' the built-in configurations a) to work out what you have to do and b) to make sure you're not inadvertently undoing something else. As a relative newbie I often wonder if it wouldn't be a lot easier starting from scratch with the 'standard configuration' that's in the documentation.

And as far as I can google - and according to SME's own forum - it's not even worth trying to have the FreeRADIUS GUI dialupadmin on any RHEL distro, and because of the 'non-standard' configurations of SME it's not recommended to use Webmin on it.

I'd guess ClarkConnect suffers from the same drawbacks - the difficulty and inadvisability of trying to further modify something that's already been modified by someone else - but I've never tried it and if it leaves the underlying OS in a purer state that SME it might better suit me.

From Andrew:

I'd guess ClarkConnect suffers from the same drawbacks - the difficulty and inadvisability of trying to further modify something that's already been modified by someone else - but I've never tried it and if it leaves the underlying OS in a purer state that SME it might better suit me.

When ClarkConnect was based on Fedora core2, it was outstanding in this regard. You could treat it like any other FC2 install. It was brilliant.

So much so that I had quite a task upgrading it - because of my mods being incompatible with theirs. So now I've gone back the other way running a very clean and unmodified CC 4.1 machine, and a separate linux work horse machine.

Its a pity because now my dedicated firewall is quite a powerful box and a 330 MHz Celeron would do the job.

From RainDog:

It's all a matter of what you want to do. As a basis for small business servers I've had many successes with SME. Set and forget. Capable , secure etc.

What I dont recommend is messing too much with SME (or CC) builds to run custom application, you see tales of woe all though the discussion boards with attempts at webmin etc. SME does what it does very well. My preferred option is to set SMEs up in gateway server mode and use a second box or board for any specialist application given that most aren't particularly demanding the hardware expense is much less than the labour involved and you can still rely on the SME box for gateway security.

And as far as I can google - and according to SME's own forum - it's not even worth trying to have the FreeRADIUS GUI dialupadmin on any RHEL distro, and because of the 'non-standard' configurations of SME it's not recommended to use Webmin on it.

I'd suggest using a CentOS box for this it's getting a little off the SME path.

I'd guess ClarkConnect suffers from the same drawbacks

Same drawbacks yes. But those drawback are advantages in another's situation. SME and CC are rock solid quick setup configurations, in doing this they offer little for the experimenter.

cheers..

More about the thinking part on the next post.