Protectli Vault FW2B - 2 Port, Firewall Micro Appliance/Mini PC - Intel Dual Core, AES-NI, 8GB RAM, 120GB mSATA SSD

This thing has been great. It's the perfect router/firewall for my home. It's silent and reliable. Protectli also has a great little UPS to use with this.

I've been using a Protectli Vault FW2B, with pfSense installed, as my home firewall for a few years now. If you're comfortable with Linux, it's a delight. I had no idea of how many friends I had in China and Russia until I installed this device.

Just so everyone knows, this let out a long beep upon power application. That long beep, or beeps, is not good, as far as I understand, but all it means is that you need a dumb USB keyboard and a dumb HDMI monitor. My mechanical keyboard wasn't recognized, and my nice monitor wasn't either. It was just a blank black screen with no input. So I plugged it in to my TV and it recognized that and set up was smooth sailing from there.

I setup the Sophos Home firewall on a Mini PC I had purchased here on Amazon; it quickly failed. This is a much better choice for a firewall. There are directions on how to install Sophos and they point out the WAN/LAN ports are reversed with it. My only suggestion would be to buy directly from the manufacture as there are more configuration options.

I've been running OPNSense on this for a while now and it works well. I have a 800 mbps connection and it hasn't had any issues. I think I would have liked to have gone with a slightly higher CPU since it often goes to 80% CPU during normal use. However, it doesn't seem to impact the router functionality so probably not an issue. The only thing I've run into is iPerf3 throttling, most likely to CPU usage. However, that's not really a primary use case. I love the fanless design. The outside is a bit warmer than I expected. OPNSense shows the internal temp to be 26C, but I very much doubt that since it is lower than room temp. Would recommend.

Edit 7/19/2019: I'm happy to report that the replacement has been set up and in use for more than two weeks now, without most of the previous issues. I did still notice some flickering with the HDMI signal, but since I'm not using this device regularly with a monitor attached it's a non issue for me. Review changed to 4 stars from a currently (mostly) happy customer. (Original Review): Was in the process of setting this up as a firewall/router for my home. Life got in the way, and it sat powered on but pretty much idle for about a week. Well, that's how long I left it for, I really don't know how long it actually worked. Came back around to finish setting it up and it was locked up. Power cycled it and video on the HDMI started fritzing out. Swapped to other HDMI and worked fine for a few minutes then locked up again. Let it sit powered off to cool for a while and it finally came back up. This was the point I decided to wipe the SSD and hit the return button. I'm hoping this was a fluke, as I really like the system in general. We will see how the replacement works out (and edit review accordingly).

My 5 star rating is all about what you get for the money with this machine. As for details folks shopping for a similar product may be interested in... - This machine can't do 1Gbit throughput between interfaces with pfsense: I needed a replacement for my old small-formfactor machine I had been running pfsense on because I upgraded my internet service to 1Gbit/50Mbit, and the old machine had realtek interfaces which topped out at 275 Mbit. I grabbed this box because of the price point and my budget, and when testing it maxed out just under 600Mbit/50Mbit. With my MacBook Pro directly to the modem I got 1Gbit/50Mbit easy, and when I tested with iperf using UDP from the WAN port of this machine to an ec2 T2.micro I was able to achieve 988Mbit download. Based on this testing I concluded that the celleron in this machine just isn't quite up to the task of routing 1Gbit of traffic between interfaces. During testing I could see that the majority of the CPU time was juggling interrupts and the CPU usage was absolutely maxed out. So my 5 star rating is subjective around my intended use case, because I am fine with the current performance and I plan on dropping the cash for a core i5 or i7 machine later, and then re-purposing this machine. I did want to make people aware that for a common use of these machines (running pfsense) you may have trouble achieving line-rate throughout across the two interfaces.

I've ran opnsense, untagle, and sophos xg on this little system. Sophos seems to run a little slow, the CPU sits around 20-30% consistently but I was able to max out my internet connection (500/500) and it didn't seem phased by my meager 15 clients throwing about 200-600 connections at it. Opnsense ran the best on it, very snappy. Had no issue with CPU even when maxing out my bandwidth Untagle ran very well, but I didn't feel like paying $50 to continue the service. Overall I'm very happy, I decided to stick with Sophos for the time being, even with it's UI sluggishness.