Protectli Vault FW6A - 6 Port, Firewall Micro Appliance/Mini PC - Intel Dual Core, AES-NI, Barebone

** 6 months update **I couldn't be happier with this unit. The hardware is very good, runs PFSENSE without a glitch, and customer service has been, once again fantastic. Last week I upgraded the BIOS, and right after the upgrade one port failed. I cut a ticket to customer support, sending all the relevant logs, boot log, pci config output, and such. They got back me after a day, and just told me to RMA the unit so they could troubleshoot the issue. They sent me a brand new unit (with already upgraded BIOS) with 2 day shipping, I swapped the RAM & SSD, and returned the old unit. This company has just gained a faithful customer, their customer support is top notch!** original review **I bought this firewall appliance about 6 weeks ago, using it with PFSENSE firewall software. I waited to give a review to get enough running experience first.The hardware is quite powerful and by far dwarfs the previous firewall hardware (good, but now 10 years old). I love that it has so many ports (I have 3 separate networks, and before with a 2 port firewall I had to use VLANs, thus multiplexing 3 networks into one single NIC). Even more importantly, they are Intel NICs. Many cheap firewalls use Realtek or other brands for the NIC hardware, which are cheaper than Intel, but not as reliable hardware wise, and the great thing with Intel NICs is that the driver is actually written by Intel. Hardware offload on Intel NICs works like a charm, on other NICs is touch and go. The 2 Ghz dual core processor has plenty of horsepower for all your needs.The hardware is built like a tank, the enclosure is essentially a giant heat sink, and the CPU operating temperature never goes above 28 C.As far as hardware installation:* I installed a 480 Gbytes SSD, but limited the user accessible space to 100 Gbytes. This gives 400% overprovisioning, which will basically make the SSD run forever and minimizes any chance of hitting flash erase, as they should always be plenty of spare blocks for reallocation. Now, 400% overprosioning is overkill (most enterprise SSDs only use 20%to 30% overprovisioning, but I want this puppy last for the next years without touching it, and SSDs are so cheap. If you want to do same, I recommend to use Linux's hdparm utility (I just burned an Ubuntu Live ISO image and run it using the DMI console). If you don't know what overprovisioning and what it means, than just buy a good 100 Gbytes enterprise class Intel or Samsung SSD and you'll be fine.* For memory: this hardware has a dual channel memory controller, so to get the best of the memory speed, you should buy two SO-DIMMS instead of one. For instance, if you want 8 Gbytes of RAM, buy 2 SO-DIMMS of 4 Gbytes each, you'll have the same capacity for about the same price, and faster memory speeds.* Performance has been great, I don't even get close to saturate the NICs or the CPU, and most importantly for me, latency is extremely low -- the latter is very important if you work from home often and you use a VPN to connect to the office.Customer service is fantastic. I had a couple problem, one with the serial port RS232-to-USB adapter, which wouldn't work correctly and another one with the PFSENSE RC 2.4 version not being able to shutdown or reboot properly. I had to do most of the work, but I got great assistance.* For the RS232-to-USB adapter, it turns out I had a very old version (10 years old) which wasn't working properly. Customer service was so nice that they sent me a free brand new adapter, and my serial console issues disappeared.* For the shutdown/reboot issue it turns out I had to disable all of power management features of the processors. I saw no difference in power consumption (11 watts), and in my opinion using power management on a firewall is quite silly anyway. Power management works by either slowing down the CPU clock or even by turning off one core. The problem with this is that when works comes in and it needs to run at full speed, there is a significant performance penalty is turning back on the core and in re-upping the operating frequency. So my recommendation (even if the production version of FPSENSE has fixed these issues) is to disable all power management features for the CPU (turn off sleep, C states, and adaptive frequency control). And for good measure use sysctl tunables in pfsense to set the lowest C state to be C0 (full power).This is a great hardware, works like a charm, and customer service is great, so I highly recommend it.

I think this is a great product! Protectli's level of support is why I purchased this - for my primary pfSense router, not big on "maybes" for this device. But the support afterwards, only self-support at this time, has been nothing short of steller so far. I have not contacted them, but probably will be, as I'm not able to get HDMI to VGA adapters working with any computer monitor, but my 60' Samsung TV loved it (and wife not impressed with bootup sequence on family TV *grin*). So, I think they note this, but I need to find out a bit more about that.Hardware wise, it is SOLID and heavy! Probably the most solid hardware device I've bought in a very long time. with an SSD, I almost feel like I could drop this on the deck and it wouldn't care (yeah, but ...no...) No fan, but temp is consistent with <10degc delta. They have instructions on their website specifically how to setup pfSense and customize it for use with the Protectli. The 6 ports are great, I've got 2 lagged, the one for WAN, one for local management, and not using the 6th one because I didn't think about LAG prior to buying this, so expansion! And SUPER performance with pfSense, CPU with about 2 dozen crazy wired and wireless devices across a dozen VLANs, plenty o' rules, and it barely breaks a sweat and hasn't used 5% of RAM or HDD. NUT works great with my CPU, so USB works just fine, no issues there. I like the possibility of upgrading to securecore, and it already has the encryption built in and just works. I haven't used the console port yet, but bought a cable for it (remember the samsung :)) I think my ONLY POSSIBLE NITPICKY thing is that the gbe port LED's are along the bottom "underneath" the cables - even with it being on a shelf above my head, I still can't glance up to look at their status, unless I walk right up and look underneath each cable. I'm a geek, Iz likez myz blinkz lights! Yeah, helps with troubleshooting too :) Oh back to performance, I'm getting the full 95ish % efficiency out of my Gbe network and the best thing? Comcast "gives me" 200Mb - from all the speed tests, I'm getting 250ish :) 'Loving it

4-stars so far - will likely upgrade to 5 stars if it's stable. So far there is a LOT to like, very sturdy due to heavy heatsink - which provides confidence in it's reliability. After hours of run-time, the temp of the heatsink stays the same. The power adapter is also high quality - it doesn't even get warm.Everything included worked well to get 16GB of ram and a 1TB SATA SSD installed. No 'quirks' with BIOS settings, it just seems to work well and just hope that it will be reliable.I did get ESXi 6.5U1 installed after a few hours of hair-pulling - but if you have trouble search for ESXi customizer powershell script. Have to do a few things to get the ISO you need with the ne1000 drivers disabled (VMWare loads that driver but it doesn't support the specific intel nics on this board) so that forces vmware to load the e1000 drivers which include support for these nics.