Firewall Micro Appliance, Mini PC Celeron N5105 Quad Core, 4 lntel i226-V 2.5Gbe LAN, AES-NI, Barebone, Soft Router, VPN, 8GB RAM 128GB SSD

It pays to watch the pricing on this class of "micro firewall appliance" over a period of time. I got lucky and was able to purchase one of these N5105, 6x2.5gbs Intel NIC units (barebones) for use as a backup OPNsense box while running Fedora server and using as a Layer 7 switch and IoT network monitoring box in the meantime for significantly less than the normal, listed price. I was expecting shipping to take 4-6 weeks, but the unit arrived within 3 days of placing the order. So my take is that the unit was already in this country and it was an "open box" resale rather than 100% brand new. Primary clue was that the included power cord did not fit the unit (seller was very responsive upon contact, and promised to send a replacement pwr cord). Thankfully I had an extra that met the pwr spec I could use temporarily. I upgraded with 16gb ddr4 ram and 512gb NVE sdd, and flashed with Fedora server. One thing to note is that Linux allows all 6 NICs to function as tagged vlan trunk ports, whereas BSD including OPNsense and pfSense, does not allow bridging of non-physical ports meaning that only one port can be a vlan trunk, so if I do need to reflash with OPNsense to replace my current FW box 4 of the NICs would become useless. But for now I'm able to use them all as part of a multi-gig speed home network. I've only had it for a few days, so this review may get an update, but so far, so good.

Aluminum alloy extruded case with flat side panels is very well designed on the outside. Note the two rectangular side panels that have machined side bevels to match the grooves on the extruded main body. Motherboard is solid and has the things you need to set up a nice fanless router (Opnsense/PFsense). The only flaw is that the CPU die does not make close contact with the copper block. To deal with this design issue, a huge amount of thermal paste is used to bridge the mm gap. A better design would have reduced the gap, used spring bolts to hold the center of the motherboard down, so as to give some flex for thermal expansion. If you system thermal throttles or random crashes after getting hot, mind the gap. If you are handy with CPU, paste, shims, this design issue is user correctable.

This machine is built really well. Very configurable bios. I would have given 5 stars, but my only complaint is that it was labeled as being compatible with pfSense however it is not compatible with 2.6.0 which is the current stable release. You need to download the 2.7.0 dev daily snapshot in order for it to detect the network devices. Opensense worked fine with v23.1.Internally it has an available m.2 slot and an extra ddr4 ram slot so it should be easily expandible.

In production at home for more than two weeks, flawless at the point I nearly forgot it. It is much more stable than my ISP provided router which is from a very-well known brand in the telco world. After trying two different models, I returned one to my ISP and put the second one in its box, keeping it for "in case of" situations.The box now runs with OpnSense 23.7 (FreeBSD 13.2) and I have really no major concerns but one: like any chinese unknown brand stuff, expect no UEFI/BIOS updates. To be fair, the BIOS is from a known BIOS vendor and contains more than enough knobs for a NUC dedicated to be a home router. The BIOS is not a tweaker's paradise but something more like the kind you find on servers or laptops: lean with a minimal set of commonly used options.I have no doubts it can handle much more traffic, thinking about my good old pfSense cluster in a former job. Even with no updates in sight, the box is very stable and do not need to be rebooted every week or so. Fire and forget, full-stop. At the moment I lies in my garage (~22°C) and the internal CPU thermal sensor shows 50°C.The only concern would be microcode updates but *BSD kernels can hot-patch it at startup and Intel provides their microcode updates publicly, so you can download and apply them.The only thing that would have been a really nice addition: CoreBoot. To be fair, CoreBoot EFI x86/64 is still considered as being experimental at date of writing. Last but not least, a PoE version of it is what would be a really nice upgrade, no more wall-wart.You can add a WiFi NIC but honestly, unless you are running on a tight budget, use a dedicated WiFi AP.No pre-installed OS which is perfectly fine, no hassle to remove-and-reinstall. Really appreciated.

Very good Mini PC. The seller was prompt and fast and responsive. The PC works excellent for what I use it. I highly recommend this seller.

I recently purchased it and installed pfSense. It works without any issues whatsoever. If the NVME M.2 and RAM were from any recognized brand, I would have given 5 stars rating. Ordered another 6 ports one without any RAM and storage,

I bought 2 of them (16gb RAM and 256 GB nvme drive). I installed pfSense CE. It was easy. I then added some packages (pfBlocker, for instance). I had many data corruption when restarting the device. I suspected a bad drive, for it tended to happen when downloading databases. So I installed 2 nvme (zfs mirror). It was better, for no corruption for a few days... then, after a disconnnect (done to simulate a power loss), it restarted (while before this test, it could not and I had to reinstall from scratch). But then, there was again some corruptions and I had to reinstall again pfSense. I am very disappointed of the probably low silicon quality. Would not buy again. I will keep it but with backups and a reliable UPS.

Worked a for a couple of days.