Sun, 20 Jul 2003
Clark (Dis) Connect Linux
I've been running clark connect linux for years now, since the pre-1.0 release. I've come to depend on it in a milk and cookies sort of way. So imagine my excitement when they finally started building the redhat 9-based ClarkConnect 2.0 and released a beta. I decided to skip the beta and wait to test on a release candidate. This week they released an RC1. I downloaded the ISO and started installing it on a venerable old PII-333, 640 MB, 2x 8 GB disks. I had read that the list of outstanding issues, but they seemed mostly cosmetic. Unfortunately, I was wrong.
The trouble began with the installer which ran extremely slowly and crashed with an "unable to read glib-blah-blah" error. And yes, I had tested the disk with the checksum thingy. I sensed that the old cirrus logic agp video card might be part of the problem so I swapped in a spare fire gl 1000 pro. That got me past the crash. When the installer had finished, it had taken 6 hours to install the single 300 MB CD-ROM!
The slowness didn't stop there. The machine took multiple restarts to boot and when booted correctly (?), the entire boot process took ~ 20 minutes! Once it booted, the web config interface barely worked taking minutes to load a single page with some pages failing on a timeout. Running top indicated that mrtg appeared to be eating CPU so I did, "pkill mrtg" but it came back to life and I couldn't quite find the startup script to really kill it.
After a day or so of this disappointing experience, I decided to try and document my experience on the clark connect forums. That too was hopeless as I couldn't remember my login and when I created a new login, never received the confirmation mail, even after 3 days - so I blogged it.
I'm hoping that clark connect gets the issues straightened out and refrains from calling something barely beta quality a release candidate in the future. I used to think those guys walked on water.
Posted at: 08:33 | permalink
