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

Died after a couple of weeks of use.

Why did i not find this sooner.....

Been running this little guy for over two years without issue. It runs warm but rarely consumes more than 15% cpu. pFSense has been updated three or more times and its been trouble-free. I host a public facing website and this device protects my network for all sorts of intrusions.

I set up the unit with pfSense. It seemed to work fine, but unit ran VERY HOT. Only lasted about 5 months before it died. As far as I can tell the main board died probably from overheating. Many similar Mini PCs are having the same issues. Just more Chinese garbage. REVISED: I was able to revive the unit with a new CMOS battery.

Works great for pfsense. This is the third computer I purchased for this purpose. The first one no aes-ni... The second was doa... I was trying to get buy paying less than 300 for a router box, but in the end you gotta pay to play. This works.

Love this little device. Tends to run pfsense on idle a little warm 50°C,so I suggest buying a small quiet usb powered fan. Maybe have a small unit installed on future models?

Started out with 1 vault, planned to have 2 vaults for managing 2 locations. The first one came with bad RAM and bad CPU.

Im using the Protectli Vault FW4B 8GB RAM, 120GB mSATA SSD as a firewall appliance for my extensive home network. It has enough horsepower to handle several people in the household watching video, a total of 35 clients on my gigabit network, a VoIP phone system, an at-home business and inbound and outbound VPN service. I bought model with the larger RAM and SSD drive for plenty of buffering and network storage space. The PFSense community edition software is free and easy to download and write into the firewall appliance. Using a keyboard and display, the basic bring-up is easy. Once the basic firewall is active, the more advanced features of the PFSense firewall sofware can be overwhelming at first for an intermediate IT professional. I use the firewall software to VPN through my Internet provider as well as offering remote access VPN sever to my network and file share. In my setup, the firewall appliance sits between my cable modem and a managed switch and my WiFi router (which has been re-configured to be an access point). The firewall appliance serves as a router with DHCP complete with VLANs for segregating traffic. The Protectli FW4B will definitely work for a large household and a small business.

I use this unit with Untangle home version and it is rock solid. I have yet to see the CPU get over 40% load even with UTM enabled, email scanning, and ad blocking. Untangle setup took about 20 minutes from a bootable USB stick. All the ports were correctly detected during installation. It was super easy to create several vlans and it has no problem keeping up with many streaming devices going at once. The unit is completely silent and small.

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