Last night i successfully changed out the operating system on my home office firewall from IPFire to ClearOS. Got everything set up, made the necessary DHCP reservations for my virtual servers and desktop. I pulled my Engenius AP down and reconfigured the static IP address and reconnected it to the network. No communication with the ClearOS box. I made a DHCP reservation for the AP and still nothing. I pulled down the AP and configured it for DHCP and reconnected it, still nothing. The only thing i can think that might be giving me trouble is either the POE injector between the AP and switch (which was working fine up until the switchover) or there's some configuration change in ClearOS i need to make. I spent two hours banging my head against this wall last night and nothing. So now i come to you guys, any ideas?
By the sound of your post I'd be willing to wager that you're a network admin. I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on why ClearOS is a better alternative to IPFire for use as a firewall.
I was planning on using IPFire as my home firewall, but maybe you know something I don't. If you'd be willing to share what swayed your decision to switch, I'm sure some of us would be all ears.
I took Cisco certification courses in school so my background is strongly rooted in networking. Right now i perform basic business administration and maintenance.
As to ClearOS over IPFire, my main reasoning behind it was because alot of IPFire's documentation is old and sparse. ClearOS at least seems to have a more active community and better documentation. That being said, now that i've had time to play with ClearOS a bit and poke at it, i think i will be moving back to IPFire, or perhaps try pfsense again.
Long term i can't say, but from my personal experience i don't think it would be very pleasant. The biggest issue i've had is that while you can install packages from the web interface, there's no way to uninstall them. Second issue i've had is i tried to install the Samba open beta package, since in order to add users to the system you need either OpenLDAP, Samba, or an AD controller somewhere in your network that you can link the ClearOS box too. It installed successfully, but apparently the 17 character password was not strong enough, now i get authentication errors all over the place in the system.