Protectli Vault FW4B - 4 Port, Firewall Micro Appliance/Mini PC - Intel Quad Core, AES-NI, 8GB RAM, 120GB mSATA SSD

I started using Protectli Vaults in 2019 when I finally made the switch from Tomato routing to Untangle for residential routing. You can get a better price and even pick up the Vault at Protectlis offices in San Diego area. Very impressive business. I now have 5 J3160 units installed using Untangle (sorry, cant comment on Sophos or other UTM installs), and they are running with never an issue. The vaults are extremely well built, and you get much more processor/memory/SSD for your money than with UTs products (about 50% of the cost). Itd recommend at least a 120Gb mSATA and always use 8GB of RAM. Protectli is working on a Vault with SPF, so Im excited to get that when it comes out. Very pleased.

Perfect for pfsense.

This replaced a zotac zbox with a flakey RTL nic . A simple backup and restore had me up and running in a few minutes. The intel nics are immediately recognized and perform well and the serial console BIOS (115200-8-n-1) worked excellent for a vt100 serial install of pfsense. The heat sink temperature for me is right around 115F suricata, openvpn and ntopng running

This is my third unit that has now failed. There is an issue with some function with the motherboard that fails prematurely. The latest has a QC mark indicating a manufacture date of late 2018. I have had dozens of computers and none have had this high a failure rate in such a short period of time. If you need fanless SFF then these work well when they run but be prepared for it to die within a few years.

Bought to run Pfsense and discoveries that its only possible to push about 100mbit as an OpenVpn client using 256 encryption. Its perfectly fine as a router as long as youre not interested in using the router as a VPN client as well. I wish the marketing and the Amazon descr6 was more forthcoming about the expected throughput of this device and I would have just purchased a more powerful unit.

I had PFsense running on a 4 core computer that drew about 54 watts, according to my Kill A Watt. I already had the ram and the mSATA drive, and now the Protectli Vault does the same work using 10 watts.

Pros

Untangle 14.1.1 works flawlessly. Solid performance from the quad core Celeron, the ram and SSD. In the barbone version they say you should know how to install, but dont make any mention of which set of screws to remove to Best access the board. Even under load the aluminum heatsink keeps this unit cool.

I’ve installed pfsense and opnsense both. After installation when i change lan ip to 192.168.0.1 it stops working. But default configuration works fine. Also it gets hot you can’t even touch.

I had trouble with my first device, and the company resolved the problem.