Protectli Vault FW6A - 6 Port, Firewall Micro Appliance / Mini PC - Intel Dual Core, AES-NI, Barebone - Compatible with pfSense/OPNsense etc

Have had it run solid for around 2 months now and it has not missed a beat, hopefully will be equally as reliable long term. Rock solid metal case which doubles as a heat sink makes it feel a very premium product which partly justifies it’s price. Celeron CPU copes well with multiple VLANS, VPN server and client and a 500mbit WAN connection. Have mounted it sideways on the wall so that it’s tucked away out of the way. Best of all, if you have your own WiFi APs and have FTTP with BT, you can use this to connect directly to the Openreach modem and skip having to have the BT Hub router altogether.

If you want to have a reliable PFSense firewall, cant do much better than this. Enough network ports, plenty of grunt and can add enough memory and storage for caching, etc. Runs slightly warm to the touch which is showing the passive heatsink is doing its stuff. Wish it was cheaper but you get what you pay for - Not a lot of money gets a badly specced generic chinese mini pc that's badly cooled so buy once and get something decent.

East to build and add disk and memory to. Performance seems great too. Nice that it has six NICs too.

MiniPC veramente eccezionale. Performance di tutto rispetto, soprattutto in base all'utilizzo cui è destinato. Corredato di tutti gli accessori necessari (ad esempio cavi sata e supporto per un disco da 2"1/2), due slot sodimm per la memoria, msata, connettore per schedina wifi opzionale. Costruzione molto robusta, silenziosissimo (non avendo ventole), lasciato acceso senza interruzioni lo chassis esterno si scalda un po' (arriverà al massimo a 40°, in questo periodo in cui in casa ce ne sono più di 30), ma dissipa perfettamente. Le 4 porte USB, la HDMI e ben 6 porte di rete ne fanno lo strumento ideale per farne un firewall molto più potente e versatile di molte soluzioni in commercio, potendo installare una infinità di sistemi differenti come pfsense, distribuzioni linux generiche o customizzate

** 6 months update ** I couldn't be happier with this unit. The hardware is very good, runs PFSENSE without a glitch, and customer service has been, once again fantastic. Last week I upgraded the BIOS, and right after the upgrade one port failed. I cut a ticket to customer support, sending all the relevant logs, boot log, pci config output, and such. They got back me after a day, and just told me to RMA the unit so they could troubleshoot the issue. They sent me a brand new unit (with already upgraded BIOS) with 2 day shipping, I swapped the RAM & SSD, and returned the old unit. This company has just gained a faithful customer, their customer support is top notch! ** original review ** I bought this firewall appliance about 6 weeks ago, using it with PFSENSE firewall software. I waited to give a review to get enough running experience first. The hardware is quite powerful and by far dwarfs the previous firewall hardware (good, but now 10 years old). I love that it has so many ports (I have 3 separate networks, and before with a 2 port firewall I had to use VLANs, thus multiplexing 3 networks into one single NIC). Even more importantly, they are Intel NICs. Many cheap firewalls use Realtek or other brands for the NIC hardware, which are cheaper than Intel, but not as reliable hardware wise, and the great thing with Intel NICs is that the driver is actually written by Intel. Hardware offload on Intel NICs works like a charm, on other NICs is touch and go. The 2 Ghz dual core processor has plenty of horsepower for all your needs. The hardware is built like a tank, the enclosure is essentially a giant heat sink, and the CPU operating temperature never goes above 28 C. As far as hardware installation: * I installed a 480 Gbytes SSD, but limited the user accessible space to 100 Gbytes. This gives 400% overprovisioning, which will basically make the SSD run forever and minimizes any chance of hitting flash erase, as they should always be plenty of spare blocks for reallocation. Now, 400% overprosioning is overkill (most enterprise SSDs only use 20%to 30% overprovisioning, but I want this puppy last for the next years without touching it, and SSDs are so cheap. If you want to do same, I recommend to use Linux's hdparm utility (I just burned an Ubuntu Live ISO image and run it using the DMI console). If you don't know what overprovisioning and what it means, than just buy a good 100 Gbytes enterprise class Intel or Samsung SSD and you'll be fine. * For memory: this hardware has a dual channel memory controller, so to get the best of the memory speed, you should buy two SO-DIMMS instead of one. For instance, if you want 8 Gbytes of RAM, buy 2 SO-DIMMS of 4 Gbytes each, you'll have the same capacity for about the same price, and faster memory speeds. * Performance has been great, I don't even get close to saturate the NICs or the CPU, and most importantly for me, latency is extremely low -- the latter is very important if you work from home often and you use a VPN to connect to the office. Customer service is fantastic. I had a couple problem, one with the serial port RS232-to-USB adapter, which wouldn't work correctly and another one with the PFSENSE RC 2.4 version not being able to shutdown or reboot properly. I had to do most of the work, but I got great assistance. * For the RS232-to-USB adapter, it turns out I had a very old version (10 years old) which wasn't working properly. Customer service was so nice that they sent me a free brand new adapter, and my serial console issues disappeared. * For the shutdown/reboot issue it turns out I had to disable all of power management features of the processors. I saw no difference in power consumption (11 watts), and in my opinion using power management on a firewall is quite silly anyway. Power management works by either slowing down the CPU clock or even by turning off one core. The problem with this is that when works comes in and it needs to run at full speed, there is a significant performance penalty is turning back on the core and in re-upping the operating frequency. So my recommendation (even if the production version of FPSENSE has fixed these issues) is to disable all power management features for the CPU (turn off sleep, C states, and adaptive frequency control). And for good measure use sysctl tunables in pfsense to set the lowest C state to be C0 (full power). This is a great hardware, works like a charm, and customer service is great, so I highly recommend it.

4-stars so far - will likely upgrade to 5 stars if it's stable. So far there is a LOT to like, very sturdy due to heavy heatsink - which provides confidence in it's reliability. After hours of run-time, the temp of the heatsink stays the same. The power adapter is also high quality - it doesn't even get warm. Everything included worked well to get 16GB of ram and a 1TB SATA SSD installed. No 'quirks' with BIOS settings, it just seems to work well and just hope that it will be reliable. I did get ESXi 6.5U1 installed after a few hours of hair-pulling - but if you have trouble search for ESXi customizer powershell script. Have to do a few things to get the ISO you need with the ne1000 drivers disabled (VMWare loads that driver but it doesn't support the specific intel nics on this board) so that forces vmware to load the e1000 drivers which include support for these nics.

I've been a die-hard fan of Ubiquiti gear and have been using my EdgeRouter Pro-8 for a few years. It's a very reliable router and the configuration learning curve has been fun and challenging at the beginning. As much as I like the EdgeRouter, it has its limitation and something just doesn't seem to work, such as the L2TP and OpenVPN (which is a pain in the behind to configure). A few months earlier, I have been hearing some good things about pfsense so I have started digging up some YouTube videos about it. A few months later, I took the plunge and purchased a Protectli Vault, installed pfsense in there, and I couldn't be any happier. The hardware is not cheap, nor I believe a good quality and prosumer class of router / firewall should be cheap to begin with, but is it worth it? After using it for a few days, I would say YES! I put 32G of DDR4 and a 256 mSATA in there, and the box is able to handle everything, and more than everything that my EdgeRouter was unable to handle. The speed is amazing and it just works! It does not have a fan, so it's completely silent. The temperate is always less than 29 degrees at the highest but could go down to 26 in general. I did the raw ISP test and was able to do have 950mbps down from my 1G connection, did the iperf tests and able to get close to 99% full speed. With pfblocker and suricata running, the WAN speed reduction is no more than 5 to 8% and I am totally fine with it, considering that there's a lot of filtering going on in the background. The box is still in the lab VLAN for now, as I want to migrate my good old configs from my EdgeRouter (firewall rules, VLANs, NAT etc) and make sure they work, before I put it in the production LAN, but I'm quite confident that this box will do a great job. One thing that I wanted to bring up, was that I did return the other Protectli 4-port vault, since the HDMI port could not function properly without resetting the CMOS. I do not have problem with this one. Also, I contacted Protecli support via their email for an inquiry, and within an hour, I got an email back from Brent, their technical support employee with feedback, even with his direct line and asked me to call him back if needed. I did and he picked up the phone right away and helped me out on the spot. TOP NOTCH CUSTOMER SERVICE!!!! I rarely see this level of support nowadays and good luck to get support from Ubiquiti unless you use their forum. Protectli does not just make great products, but their support is amazing. You spend quite a bit on the hardware, but you do know that the company supports what they sell without giving the customers grief. Please give me a thumbs up if you find this helpful. Thank you!

I am completely new to open source routers and firewalls. I have tinkered with my Actiontec and Netgear routers and firewalls, but have only had very simple setups, and little ability to log, do advanced network partitioning, and have some opportunity for intrusion detection monitoring. I was told to checkout pfSense, but found that they are overly greedy in the configured boxes they sell, severely overpriced (pfSense, if you are reading this, I wanted to just buy your boxes but you must be more reasonable about it). An Amazon search led me here, and I bought one to check it out. I fell in love upon opening the box for this firewall appliance, the hardware is simply gorgeous, and is exceedingly well designed, built, and packaged. I'm an electrical hardware engineer, and I love to build computers too, and this is one of the highest quality little computers I've ever seen. Configuration of my first box was so simple using the pfSense USB boot installer that I was up and running very quickly, and so impressed I ordered a second one. My setup may be overkill, but this is all to protect and monitor my home business, so I paired this with 8GB DDR4, and a 240GB SSD: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B019FRD3SE/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00JT0DSQK/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 Anyway, I was able to set this up into a rather complex network that partitions my house into 3 different networks--a "wild west" where my older kids can do whatever they do, suspect IOT things devices (Alexa, Google home), the TVs, etc., a completely isolated network that my wife and I can use with our phones and laptops and feel safe, and another completely isolated network behind the second nested pfSense box so I can feel even safer, while having partitioned monitoring and logging. I had to learn a few things to pull this off, but I can only sing the praises for the excellent pfSense software and this excellent little box to run it on, highly recommended!