Patrick de Brabander wrote:

Reveived yesterday a notication for a subscription renewal

Frequently Asked Questions

Why should you renew your ClearOS subscription?



<ul>

KEEP YOUR SYSTEMS SECURE - ClearCenter quickly provides the latest security and bug fixes, having been extensively tested on tens of thousands of systems registered in the community.

KEEP YOUR NETWORK SECURE - ClearSDN services provide access to security features like audits, updated blacklists, threat protection rules and signatures and monitoring.

DEVELOPMENT AND TECHNICAL SUPPORT YOU CAN TRUST - ClearCenter believes a subscription based model is the most effective way to develop, maintain, secure and support ClearOS. The subscription model allows us to provide high quality technical support over the life of an agreement.

</ul>

I replied with the question if they would also advice their friends and relatives to renew their subscription? No reply of course. It is sad, and very annoying. I went for Zentyal as an alternative. They actually have support. Just a very small userbase I believe.

It is more that you have another message that you should start paying again for the reasons mentioned.
It would be reasonable that as a paid user you also get the service you pay for.

I have no qualms about paying for it and have been doing this for a few years only now I have paid and am not getting any service

It was also no more than a statement and I hope that there will finally be a response from Clear about this story.

Patrick de Brabander wrote:

Reveived yesterday a notication for a subscription renewal

Frequently Asked Questions

Why should you renew your ClearOS subscription?



<ul>

KEEP YOUR SYSTEMS SECURE - ClearCenter quickly provides the latest security and bug fixes, having been extensively tested on tens of thousands of systems registered in the community.

KEEP YOUR NETWORK SECURE - ClearSDN services provide access to security features like audits, updated blacklists, threat protection rules and signatures and monitoring.

DEVELOPMENT AND TECHNICAL SUPPORT YOU CAN TRUST - ClearCenter believes a subscription based model is the most effective way to develop, maintain, secure and support ClearOS. The subscription model allows us to provide high quality technical support over the life of an agreement.

</ul>

I am not sure there is any reason to have the paid packages any more. There seem to be no updates to the paid or community versions. If you have a paid version you are almost trapped in continuing to pay if you want to install any more apps, but this can be got round. I would just enable the community repos clearos-updates, clearos-centos, clearos-centos-updates and clearos-epel.

Reveived yesterday a notication for a subscription renewal

Frequently Asked Questions

Why should you renew your ClearOS subscription?





KEEP YOUR SYSTEMS SECURE - ClearCenter quickly provides the latest security and bug fixes, having been extensively tested on tens of thousands of systems registered in the community.

KEEP YOUR NETWORK SECURE - ClearSDN services provide access to security features like audits, updated blacklists, threat protection rules and signatures and monitoring.

DEVELOPMENT AND TECHNICAL SUPPORT YOU CAN TRUST - ClearCenter believes a subscription based model is the most effective way to develop, maintain, secure and support ClearOS. The subscription model allows us to provide high quality technical support over the life of an agreement.

Alan Cooper wrote:

You don't install CVEs. They are the reports of issues such as CVE-2022-46340. Search redhat.com or nvd.nist.com for the CVE. On Redhat's site, this has a score of 8.8/10 and a severity rating of "Important" which is one down from Critical. This indicates the xorg-x11-server package needs updating. This would normally happen via the ClearOS updates.

Ok. Clear
Hopely somebody at COS will push the critical updates soon

You don't install CVEs. They are the reports of issues such as CVE-2022-46340. Search redhat.com or nvd.nist.com for the CVE. On Redhat's site, this has a score of 8.8/10 and a severity rating of "Important" which is one down from Critical. This indicates the xorg-x11-server package needs updating. This would normally happen via the ClearOS updates.

Alan Cooper wrote:

It looks like there are a bunch of new updates in Centos addressing Important rated CVEs. When are these going to be released to ClearOS?

At the same time there is an update to Apache which requires a new version of the webconfig?

How long is ClearOS going to remain insecure?

Hi Alan,

is possible to install those CVE's by my self? Or has this to pass through by Clear?

I don't think there will come a new version of Webconfig
If there will be some movement at COS it will (hopely) with a new release to v8

It looks like there are a bunch of new updates in Centos addressing Important rated CVEs. When are these going to be released to ClearOS?

At the same time there is an update to Apache which requires a new version of the webconfig?

How long is ClearOS going to remain insecure?

Wayland Sothcott wrote:

Valery Cottet wrote:

The last clearOS vesion was "end of life" on March of 2022 according to their own website: https://documentation.clearos.com/content:en_us:announcements_releases_clearos_end_of_life
I am quite surprised that they still sell the subscription even if the product is not anymore updated nor supported.
As Herm Harrison mentioned, there is a message back in January 2022 from Michael indicating that ClearOS will be supported in the long term but maybe the long term was until the end of life of the product, two months later.

Oh, I had not seen that! It's still receiving updates but clearly when marked end of life we should not be doing new installs for people. I feel like one of the people left behind at a party when they switch off the disco lights and the white blaze of the florescent lights shows the mess left behind. I feel quite sad about this.

Still selling and auto-renewing subscriptions despite offering no or extremely limited support. I was pointed in the direction of NethServer (https://www.nethserver.org/) which I will be installing and testing as time allows. V7 (current) is based on CentOS7, but V8 which is available for download while continuing development will run on top of several distributions ( Rocky Linux 9.0 (Blue Onyx) x86-64, CentOS Stream 9 x86-64, Debian 11 (bullseye) x86-64) making future upgrades easier and less distribution dependent.

Valery Cottet wrote:

The last clearOS vesion was "end of life" on March of 2022 according to their own website: https://documentation.clearos.com/content:en_us:announcements_releases_clearos_end_of_life
I am quite surprised that they still sell the subscription even if the product is not anymore updated nor supported.
As Herm Harrison mentioned, there is a message back in January 2022 from Michael indicating that ClearOS will be supported in the long term but maybe the long term was until the end of life of the product, two months later.

Oh, I had not seen that! It's still receiving updates but clearly when marked end of life we should not be doing new installs for people. I feel like one of the people left behind at a party when they switch off the disco lights and the white blaze of the florescent lights shows the mess left behind. I feel quite sad about this.

This is a very sad situation. Nick Howitt works tirelessly keeping ClearOS supported but I'm not sure what the rest of these people are doing; https://www.clear.co.com/leadership
I've been a community user of ClearOS and set a few customers up with servers with some paid services, nothing super lucrative for ClearOS but I usually got them to pay ClearOS for something. It has been a very useful server for me but I feel that ClearOS 5 was the best one and it's been declining ever since. I decommissioned a ClearOS 5 last month and was reminded how good it was.

The market has changed. It's become harder to run your own web server and email server and ClearOS needs to provide tools to make that easy again. With the demise of CentOS 8 there is not a clear path to ClearOS 8. Personally I've been using both ProxMox and TrueNAS. I think the answer to file serving is TrueNAS because it has much more comprehensive Access Control and it's snapshots are accessible with a right click in Windows File Explorer. I still don't have an alternative to the nice single sign-on for all the ClearOS services like VPN, File Server and Email.

Speaking of VPN it seems OpenVPN is broken in that it's very very slow when it used to be fast.

I do think there is a market for a ClearOS type server, all the little NAS units seem to do a similar job to ClearOS. However I feel like ClearOS has become like an old Samsung TV, loads of cool Internet based features that no longer work properly. Almost better if they were never included in the first place.

I want to see it all come right.

Nick Howitt wrote:

There has been some support for a few issues, but not much - and he is on holiday for a week now. Completely wrong answers have been given and one system has potentially been bricked and then abandoned by support. It seems that the 4h and 24h response times contracted on Platinum and Gold systems respectively are not being honoured with tickets unanswered for over 2 weeks. Another Clearcenter service seems to have gone down on Friday. I hear nothing from Michael so I doubt if I have any future left with Clearcenter. The whole thing is a sorry saga.

Michael did reply indicating ClearOS will be supported in the long term and that I should expect follow-up and eventual resolution; however, at this point I feel I need to consider other options moving forward as support was discontinued with no notice to customers and no firm date or plan provided when it will be restored. I'm expected to keep our servers running, but it's a small part of my overall responsibilities which is why reliable support is important to us, and I would expect others using the product. I wish you much success wherever the future takes you and appreciate the support you have been able to provide over the years.

Thank you Nick. I knew something was up as you had always provided exemplary service. I did contact Michael through the forum and will try by email. It's really disappointing to see ClearOS appear to wither away. I tried calling, also, without success. It seems without you there is no one who is able to provide support. Fortunately, I was able to arrive at a solution. The failed drive was identified by its UUID in the fstab file. I formatted a new drive matching the file system and replaced the old UUID with the one from the new drive which got me past the error and bootable. Still some work to do, but back in operation. Ironically, we were billed for support a few days after the trouble started. If there is no intent to reinstate you or offer support, we will seek to downgrade our plan and migrate away from ClearOS which we have used since its 5.0 release.

Hello Herm. I've seen your tickets and feel very much for you. Unfortunately at the beginning of August, Clearcenter decided not use my services this month, but at the same time, don't seem to have made any arrangements for ClearOS technical tickets to be answered. Also there have been no updates to ClearOS as I do them but fortunately, there don't appear to have been any critical CVE patches released so at least ClearOS still appears to be secure.

I'm afraid I have no idea what is going on in Clearcenter. All I can do is suggest you e-mail Michael Proper directly at mproper@clearcenter.com.

I am really sorry I can't help as I can see you are desperate. For me, I am likewise in limbo.