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

This Protectli Vault FW4B replaced my ISP’s Router/Modem/WiFi Combo:

Easy to install and operate with pfsense community edition. Just downloaded an image file and I was up and running. pfsense comes with a version of Free BSD as an operating system as this system is bare bones. You need to understand what you are doing. That being said, I was up and running in less than an hour with really packet packet moving This replaced my problematic Netgate 3100, also with pfsense. The Celeron, 8 gigs of RAM and 120 gigs of space makes it a really fast mover for streaming. I use for two separate networks in my house and that was a breeze to set up. There is room for one more completely segmented network. I use IPv6 routing and it works like a champ. Highly recommended for a bare bones system for pfsense fir walling.

I found this while looking for a replacement for an old first-generation FitPC device that I used to use as a network firewall. The FitPC still runs, but for the last few years, Ive needed something with gigabit ethernet ports, which it doesnt have.

This is a great piece of hardware for running the OPNsense or pfSense firewalls. I installed the latest version of both operating systems on it without any issues. Its been running without any hiccups for several months now.

Had to get this after noticing that my old laptop with pfsense was not able to keep up with newly installed fiber. It was a weak link. Backed up and restored on this device - rock solid and stable.

My work relies on pFsense (firewall/router) and I had a SG-2440 (2 core Atom C2358) go belly up after five (5) years, it wasnt the netgate products fault, e.g. Intels Atom C2000 processor family has a fault that effectively bricks devices, costing the company a significant amount of money to correct e.g. Errata note AVR.54, titled System May Experience Inability to Boot or May Cease Operation,

Pros

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).

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.

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