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

This is a nice little firewall box, I have Ubuntu Server 18.04 running on mine, acting as a firewall/router for my home network. For this purpose it works great.

A top-rated review says that this box can’t run VPNs faster than 100Mbps up, 100Mbps down. That’s not true; running OpenWrt, I got 700Mbit/sec iperf3 up/down using WireGuard®️ in a live test over Verizon FiOS to an quad core endpoint at packet.net. With a machine this fast, you will expose weaknesses in the other VPN endpoint, and in the network in the middle. You may also expose performance problems in your VPN implementation; OpenVPN can be quite slow.

Pros

I purchased this unit in order to run a stand-alone pfSense firewall for my home network. Its silent operation--no fans needed--makes it the perfect compact host.

Great device to use as a firewall and vpn client.

This server works great for Pfsense.

This is the fourth system I built. This did not last as long as any of the other ones. I submitted a service ticket on their web site. Lets see what the response will be.

Works like a charm

So far this little firewall has rocked. I was running pfsense as a VM, but decided to move it out to a dedicated piece of hardware and this fit the bill nicely. Running the latest pfsense software which was very easy to install via USB stick. I did end up buying a USB fan to help keep this cool, its air cooled so a fan just helps out.

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