Topic: Clark-Connect revisited - SME compares good

[azche24]

Hi, all,

after a messy breakdown of my homeserver i gave clark-connect "home-edition" a try, installing Version 3.0 on a spare machine while waiting for a running SME-install  

SME compares good:

* SME has more features than cc (Antivirus-contribs, SpamAssassin, RBL-blocking plus contribs)
* SME can handle mails more transparently: more maildomains without restrictions
* SME runs better in SAMBA: I am using Domain-security and that was hard to implement in cc; also it was very hard to establish "ibays", because you have to create them handish.
* SME Samba group management is much better and easier: I use "localadmins" e.g. for writing the application ibay. And "family" for other stuff. Myself can get easily member of both groups. With cc you have to manually join to groups
* SME runs better on old hardware: I took my old PII350 with 390 MB Ram. CC was crawling ultra-slow on this hardware, that was very good for SME 6.01
* SME CAN do backups. Easy and complete. CC has (as far as i learned) no real file-backup.

But also i have to say:

* CC is much more uptodate in the base (Fedora). This results in easier installation (kudzu), german installation messages (nice, uh?) and i guess the hardware basis is much bigger than SME

* CC has dansguardian integrated. I like that for the home use. My kids do not like pron

* CC has a very easy DynDNS - Setup. I like that. And it is a nice opportunity for a company to earn money with service-connections, domain administration and such. So contribs-org could perhaps refinance by that optional? Personally i would pay for services like DNS-Integration or update service, even if using a GPL-Product. Especially for home-use, where seat licences do not matter much.

* CC has samba 3 - which seems to be faster (?) and should be easier to integrate into bigger networks.

After my first tests i am considering to take cc for home use. Becaus i need an "easy-package" there without any modifications.

For office use and bigger networks i will stick with SME as long as there is hardware supported by it  

The calculated costs of a 20 WS network run by cc with antivirus and spamfilter plus service connction added to about 600 $ plus annually. Plus much bigger hardware than i am runnig now. And that is too expensive for a small office like ours and equals to the MS-Stuff.

So SME will hopefully always have it's niche.

[bugme]

Covered some stuff i didnt know was in CC.

Compared it to SME. What version of SME? And comparing to SME with contribs installed or plain? Which contribs?

Guess it's time to give SME 7 alpha a try i guess.

Thanks!

[azche24]

Compared it to SME. What version of SME? And comparing to SME with contribs installed or plain? Which contribs?

Guess it's time to give SME 7 alpha a try i guess.

Thanks!

I use 6.01 "official release" with updates plus antivirus + spamfilter from jesper plus hylafax from jesper plus a few little contribs (dhcp manager, backup2ws...).

This was a pretty heavily configured server, that perhaps was the reason, why it broke after 5 years and upgrading from 5.6x on.  

I am not using alphas and betas in production. I do not have knowledge and time to find and fix bugs.