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

i purchased this to run pf sense firewall

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.

So far the system has been running without any issues except that the cooling sink get hot fairly quick to the touch. The normal temperature in the house does not seem enough to cool it an ambient temp without a forcing air through the fins.. I had to add a cooling fan on top of the sink to keep it cool to the touch. Another point to make to take in consideration is the price. I would get it for under $300 if I would go directly to Protectli instead.

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.

Well built fanless mini pc. I set it up for use as a router w/PFSense. Working without issue. I bought the memory and storage below to use in conjunction with the Protectli Vault

Pulled it out of the box, plugged in a VGA monitor and USB keyboard and Rufus bootable pfSense on USB. Took about 10 minutes and it was running pfSense. Ive had it running for about 48 hours and so far it is perfect.

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 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.

llego de forma impecable, cumple con lo que se ofrece

Bought this for running Untangle firewall at home. CPU sits at less than 1% all day. Only complaint is the unit does run very warm to the touch. Performance has been excellent to date and all features of Untangle seem to be supported with this hardware.