August 15, 2008 General 0

Unfortunately it’s time for me to part ways with Astaro Security Linux once again. Back in the version 4 days things were running great and then version 5 came out. it was an unmitigated disaster. I quit using Astaro for a while until version 7 came out. I have run v7 up to 7.2x. I have suddenly had issues with vpn’s not passing through, high amounts of resource usage, and annoying bug and coding quality lapses. Their memory configuration tuning is far form optimal(that’s because they have to try to shoehorn this into 256 megs of ram for their exceedingly weak asg 2xx series). Add to that they have replaced the anti-spam engines and http proxy caching engines with proprietary ones and it is starting to look like a trend is forming. The final straw was a recent anti-spam update starting hanging and crashing Astaro firewalls everywhere. The fix it to either reboot your machine and hope it gets the new fixed update or log in as root and restart the proprietary daemon that is responsible for the issues. I tend to find weird bugs. Astaro’s attitude has relaly changed. Back in the v4 days when i would find a weird one they would acknowledge it, fix it, and move on. Now the policy is to deny it exists, blame the bug tester, and sweep it under the rug. With them now taking more and more of it proprietary plus their commercial success I think they feel they don’t have to listen to folks who find the strange bugs but only the showstoppers and minor ones most folks will notice. After this i figured it’s time to depart once again watch from afar and see if v8 is going to be better or continue the trend towards mistuned kernel settings, bloaty and buggy proprietary software, and slow performance. I hope not as Astaro has some awesome potential and for home use you can’t beat the price..free. However untangle and ipcop are the same price..free.