I’ve been using Astaro since they were at version 4. I’ve noticed a disturbing trend. V4 was, in my opinion, the best version they have ever released. Version 5 was badly bug ridden upon released necessitating at least 2 updates before it was running decently. I totally bypassed v6 as the beta wasn’t beta quality at all and i did not wish to risk it. I actually went to ipcop and modded the heck out of it. That setup worked so well I also deployed it to clients. Astaro then released v7 which was a major step forward and was the first usable Astaro version in over a year. I ran v7 until recently when I installed v8. after a couple of months v8 crashed and I had to go back to v7(Astaro support had no idea why it died). During my first v7 run Astaro had a major issue with their updates. They put out a pattern update(anti-malware, anti-spam, and ips) that caused the ips to eat ALL traffic. The result was basically a dead box. The thing was you also could not get into the webadmin either. Quite a few systems were taken offline by this flub up. Astaro did post something on their website (not much help since you couldn’t surf) but did nothing else to notify. I wasn’t using the ips at the time so I was in the clear….but that’s one of the most highly touted features so it’s in wide use. Astaro quickly got an update out and boxes came back to life.
ON to v8. The first time i tried it v8 ran fine for about 2 days. Suddenly the internet became unstable and the firewall would not pass traffic. No webadmin access, no console, no nothing. Only power cycling the box got it running again. On the forums the amount of bug reports with the supposedly general release were cropping up. Things from Grub problems meaning the system would not install or boot on certain HP machines, to various daemon instabilities. After my v8 crashed I reverted back to 7.5x until things settled down. About a week ago I reinstalled the newest 8.001.
Astaro has now put out another bad update. This one caused machines to start having hardware failures due to apparent driver corruption. I’m curious how they are messing this up since these up2dates are only supposed to be detection updates. When they had the last major pattern bomb no hardware was directly affected. However this most recent one did affect hardware. So now the pattern mistakes are starting to affect more and more of the system. Is this going to be a continuing trend? Astaro I’m getting nervous about partnering with you. You do protect your partners from lost sales by unscrupulous vendors but can your partners survive too many more of these embarrassments? It’s time to get your GQ systems caught up. Either you are growing too fast or you are getting lazy. Either one of these will spell big trouble for you and your partners if you don’t get on the ball.