ClarkConnect

Recently I've been helping a small non-profit organization set up a Linux fileserver/router/gateway. There are several "all-in-one" sort of small business server options, and from those we chose ClarkConnect 4.2 Community Edition, available from www.clarkconnect.com. ClarkConnect is based on standard CentOS Enterprise Linux packages, but includes tightly integrated services and a web-based graphical management interface. This is a little different than what I'm used to, most of my experience has been with full-fledged CentOS servers dedicated to a particular service or services. This is a "nutshell" overview of my experience so far with ClarkConnect.

Generally I've found CC to be easy to use, but somewhat restrictive. That's not surprising since I'm accustomed to having all configuration options available, not just those provided by CC's graphical interface. I'm sure this is a normal tradeoff; ease of use versus complete control and configuration. I tend to prefer having all options available and can get along fine without the administration interface, but in this case ease of use was more important. You can still manually configure some things that are not available in the graphical interface - we did this with their UPS monitoring software "apcupsd". My advice is to make sure all your requirements fall within the capabilities of the graphical administration interface if ease of use is your primary concern. If ease of use and the "all-in-one" nature of the server are not priorities then you may as well use a standard CentOS/RHEL server and simply avoid the restrictiveness of CC.

Cons of ClarkConnect:
1. Not quite as stable as a standard CentOS/RHEL release, particularly their default dansguardian-av content filtering package which apparently is the dansguardian 2.9 beta - not a stable release. (although they do optionally provide the stable 2.8 version)
2. Doesn't come with the full Bind DNS server, instead using dnsmasq - a caching DNS forwarder designed for small gateways using NAT.
3. Graphical management interface isn't always accurate and can be misleading. For example, when we had some problems with the squid proxy server it would report that squid was running because there was a squid PID file - even though the squid process had actually died.

Benefits of ClarkConnect:
1. Easy to use web interface for administration of services, users, groups, etc.
2. Binary compatible with RHEL packages if you need to install some extra software.
3. Easy online updates of packages/modules from within the web interface or from the command line using apt-get.

~Matt