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

Pretty good first impression together with PFSense! Yes, it gets warm even when it's idle, but there is a simple solution for that: "AC Infinity MULTIFAN S1, Quiet 80mm USB Fan, UL-Certified for Receiver DVR PlayStation Xbox Computer Cabinet Cooling". This fan is pretty quiet, the size is a perfect match and it can run at 3 different speeds. In my case the lowest speed is enough to keep this device only at 2-3 degrees above room temperature. If it gets warmer I will simply switch the fan to its second speed and it will still be silent. The PFSense load and configuration took some time, but it 100% worth it. To my surprise the speed became noticeably faster since the entire parasite traffic was blocked. I asked Grok to generate me a step by step manual keeping in mind my router brand and model and it made it. There were some difficulties, but not too critical and easily resolvable. What nice is - I dropped an old 15" monitor and a keyboard together with this PC, UPS, cable modem, router, switch to where they are almost invisible, at the very top of the furniture where I can check it every time if I need to. The web interface is powerful and works pretty well on both my laptop and even my cell phone.

Protectli support was excellent in helping me be successful with getting the device set up correctly. That made this purchase very worthwhile!

The best small business, and home firewall available. The FW4B gives you all the power you need to protect your home or small office network from outside incursions. Running PFSense the options to run system wide data caching, VoIP, VPN etc are almost endless.

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 wasn't the netgate products fault, e.g. Intel's 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,"So I needed a replacement fast Netgate was great but the RMA process is about 2 weeks (in fact they covered it free of charge on a 5 year old unit), but I needed to be back on line yesterday. I couldn't get the "newer" SG-3100 as it has no AES-NI (required for the next generation of pFsense). So I was forced to look to other sources I settled on a Protectli FW4B (4 core Celeron J3160).I only lost one (1) business day as the Protectli FW4B arrived quickly (as in 2 days) sowing up at an Amazon locker on Saterday.PROS:I didn't need to change any configuration after 1) booting off a CE USB image and installing pFsense 2.4.4 then 2) updating the config.xml file on the Protectli FW4B system.The SG-2440 system has 2X the cores and 2X the performance over my old SG-2440CONS:I used the HDMI port and a USB keyboard to confiure, however the FW4B is picky out which LCD Monitors it will support. I have three 1920 x 1080 Monitors available but only one would sync up and display the Bios. Once I got a one of my three LCD monitors to sync up to the FW4B it was smooth sailing. Pontecelli claims they might have issues with weird resolutions. Note once pFsense is installed you essentially have a headless device after configuring it.Note, I didn't want to deal with a serial console, Pontecelli provided a micro USB to DB-9 Serial - seriously when is the last time anyone used a serial cable in the age of USB. Even if they supplied a micro USB to USB cable one would still have to find and install serial drivers something that is still a pain to do (I needed to do this for my old SG-2440)

The media could not be loaded. Started out with 1 vault, planned to have 2 vaults for managing 2 locations. The first one came with bad RAM and bad CPU.Asked for a replacement, and the replacement had good RAM but during the memtest86 process, the vault decided to shut down and never turn back on again. So basically, the replacement turned out to be DOA.This is my second replacement, so I learned to be wise and do a memtest86 (even bought the 9.4 version) stress test before actually putting it into production. I'm glad the second replacement passed with flying colors! The tests I did were pretty much all of them, with 10 passes and the CPUs all active in parallel mode.Not sure if it's Protectli getting bad hardware or it's just broken hardware being exchanged around the ecosystem, but yeah, this upgrade was a pain. Still I'm glad the second replacement worked, you just have to be pretty lucky :)Update: I got the 4th unit so far, with 2 returned because of DOA and failing CPU/RAM, this unit also passed as well! For those looking to purchase one of these, definitely make sure to do a full MemTest86 run, at least 10 times with 0 errors!

Love this thing. Network chuck has a video on how to set it up.

I instantly fell in love with this thing when I got it and still love it. Works beautifully with pfsense. Supporting blazing fast speeds in my home network plus VPN and content blocking for ads trackers and malware for everyone connected to the WiFi which I’m running out of a separate WAP attached to the OPT1 port. I love the start up and shut down tunes it plays out of the beeper which let me know when the network is back on, it’s not simply a power up jingle, it actually waits until pfsense has finished booting up to play it. I also love how sturdy and heavy it is. Note: this kind of firewall running pfsense is very warm constantly, it needs to be able to dissipate the heat so don’t just cram it in a tight space just because you can, it might overheat.