ClearOS used to be ClarkConnect. Not sure what's changed but the purpose of this post is to share some of my experiences installed ClearOS. The main issue I ran into with the install is that CD-ROM or FTP are the only supported media.
What this means is that whether you use PXE or a USB Memory stick that's really just the bootstrap part. The rest of it has to happen via FTP or CD-ROM. Since I didn't have an CD-ROM drive I chose the FTP option and the default ClearOS FTP server. It took forever. I mean I started it in the evening and checked it once in a while and it had finished sometime at night. Clearly painful. And my first install didn't even work. Second one took even longer and I gave up. So I setup an FTP Server on my workstation and shared the ClearOS ISO. Googling led me to a useful post in the ClearOS forum with the info I needed about the user id and password that was being used by the installer ("enterprise-51" / "clearos"). That did the trick and the install was much faster than before.
What ultimately led me to give up on ClearOS was performance. It was sluggish and a little bit unresponsive from the web UI and the Console. And that was with almost all features turned off (not even a DHCP server running). It was clearly overkill for what I needed and way to much for my Atom N270 with 2 GB RAM to handle.
I'm also not much of a "read the manual" kind of person. I had no trouble configuring pfSense or Endian but I really couldn't make sense of how to define my interfaces/zones with ClearOS and how to setup a captive portal, etc.
So I passed on it.... next up Endian revisitied (I got a CD-ROM drive) and a new contender: Mikrotik RouterOS.
