ClearOS 7 went past its end-of-life yesterday, so what now? All the Centos7 repos which ClearOS relied on for updates when updates were actually happening, have now been pulled. ClearOS is 23 months behind Centos for updates as no updates to ClearOS have happened since 31st July 2022. There are critical vulnerabilities in ClearOS including in the core packages, so ClearOS must be considered insecure.

I understand Nick Howitt has a copy of the necessary Centos repos and updated ClearOS packages which can bring ClearOS up to date to 30th June 2024 and will fix all critical vulnerabilities to that point and that he can be contacted at:

[email protected]

But that can only be a short term measure because, if any more vulnerabilities get discovered, they will never be fixed, no matter how severe the vulnerabilty. Really the whole ClearOS operating system should be replaced.

I am not sure what happened to all Michael Proper's platitudes and promises of a replacement. Vapourware?

Personally I would have thought splitting the firewall from the rest of the server functions was a good way to go. For a Firewall, I'd look at pfSense, Opnsense, IPFire and NethSecurity (based on OpenWRT). For a server, it really depends on your use case.