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

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

Computer comes with BIOS not patched for latest vulnerabilities, would not use it in home network, any network.

Perfect little box for pfsense.

I was a bit nervous about this unit after reading other reviews but have this up and running and it runs quick and actually really cool (CPU temp 80 degrees). Barely warm to the touch. I have it running pfSense and it is able to keep up with my 1G connection quite well while even having a OpenVPN connection continuously open (all traffic not going through it obviously).

This is a very solid and sturdy box. Setup was a breeze. SSD, RAM and pfSense installed in about 30 mins. No issues whatsoever so far, and it has handled everything I have thrown at it without the CPU going above 25%.

I purchased the device to install PFsense on it for my home network. My expectations were low on the installation and setup however I was way off. I simply stuck the PFsense USB in and powered on the little guy and it took right off and PFsense was installed in less than 5 minutes, no issues. The GUI was super slow and unresponsive right after the install but after an hour or so it caught up and hasnt been slow since. I really like this device for what I have going on and I would recommend it. The one concern about it would be how hot it runs. its running in the 120 degrees (F) range but other than that, Im really impressed! Im even thinking about getting another one to create a solid VPN tunnel.

Ive taken this and installed Sophos UTM 9.6 on it and I expect it will be my firewall (no matter the OS or version) for a very long time (I got it with 8GB ram and 32GB msata)! I bought it to replace a virtual Sophos as well as actual Sophos firewall appliance. This thing is tiny, very standard Intel hardware, silent and works great! Would definitely recommend!

Maybe a little pricey but seems to work great!

Easy install and operation with OPNSense. Reasonably fast operation with hardware for the money, too slow in my tests to run squid proxy with filtering if speed/heavy usage required but I don’t really need that. It is very reasonably warm in operation but I added an external usb quiet free standing fan to move low speed air across it and case stays cool to touch. Very satisfied, and recommended. Been running a month now, absolutely no issues.

Does all I want it to do. openvpn lets encrypt hardware encryption. Runs very warm but it seems to be no big deal. If it bothers you slap a cheap quiet fan on top of the heat sink and call it a day. Will run cool in my experience. Your mileage may vary.