February 28, 2008
Bye WHS Hello ClarkConnect?
Our buddies in Redmond have admitted to a problem. They don’t know what is causing data corruption with the Windows Home Server that users are complaining about. Remember these are the ‘experts’ on all things OS —
Microsoft has admitted it still has no fix for a data corruption issue Windows Home Server users are encountering.
The software giant first acknowledged the problem on December 21 last year, providing a list of programs that could cause data on a Windows Home Server to become corrupted, including Windows Vista Photo Gallery, Windows Live Photo Gallery, OneNote 2007, OneNote 2003, Outlook 2007, Money 2007, SyncToy 2.0 beta, QuickBooks and uTorrent.
It says customers have also reported problems with the following software (though Microsoft has not yet been able to replicate the problem first-hand): Photoshop Elements, Zune Software, Apple iTunes, TagScanner, Mozilla Thunderbird, Adobe Lightroom, Intuit Quicken, MS Digital Image Library, MP3BookHelper, ACDSee, WinAmp, Windows Media Player 11, Microsoft Office Excel and Visual DataFlex.
Heh. I figure eventually they will find the cause and fix it. That is MS strength, they never say die unless they know it is hopeless.
But I have to ask, why not consider something else? A product I find very appealing in this same market niche is ClarkConnect. There he goes again talking about Linux again. Yeah. But hold your thought and consider I have had version 3 of that software running at home for 430 days straight. Try that with a windows box. Ain’t happening.
Clarkconnect is the name of the product and the company. It has its feet in both both FOSS and commerical interests. Its a VPN box, its a NAT, its a storage server, its a mail caching server, its got intrusion firewalls. It can do bandwidth throttling. It can protect the kiddies from bad sites you find. It supports wireless wifi. And to top it off you can manage the box with a web front end. You can buy the commerical product that has even more bells and whistles. And you can subscribe to their internet protection service an they will keep your server up to date automatically against most known viruses/spyware/etc.
Its a good thing.
Filed under Microsoft, Open Source by Dr. Dog
Comments on Bye WHS Hello ClarkConnect? »
Eco Drive Blog » Blog Archive » Bye WHS Hello ClarkConnect? @ 1:28 am
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Mark @ 1:58 am
I’ve been using ClarkConnect for at least 3 years, and although I’ve mostly been satisfied, I become more disenchanted with every release. The reasons are the lack of documentation and the lack of a community behind it (I’ll consider the web forum a community when answers are actually given to requests and the vast majority of requests for help don’t go unanswered.)
Since ClarkConnect is in business to make money, I can understand it giving little support to those who don’t pay, but it has a tendency to not support apps that require distro-specific support in order to be useful. Two such examples are the new groupware and SSL manager modules, which are both ClarkConnect creations and require ClarkConnect-specific information to use. While there is some documentation available for both, they leave out most of the distro-specific information needed to be useful. I think it would be significantly easier to setup these features in a free distro that has a good help system, rather then trying to sort through the gaps in the ClarkConnect documentation about the specificity of it’s creation; not to mention that you’re more able to customize to your liking this way. Because of this, I’ll probably be trading in my ClarkConnect box for something else in the near future.
The only people whom I’d recommend ClarkConnect to are those who are willing to pay for a non-free version, and my opinion isn’t worth much here, because I’ve never used a non-free version before. If you’re unwilling to pay, I’d suggest you try a truly free distro, because it’s likely to have considerable more help freely available. ClarkConnect is a fine distribution, but it’s lack of adequate documentation for it’s distro-specific modules is a killer for non-paying users.