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

This replaced a zotac zbox with a flakey RTL nic . A simple backup and restore had me up and running in a few minutes. The intel nics are immediately recognized and perform well and the serial console BIOS (115200-8-n-1) worked excellent for a vt100 serial install of pfsense. The heat sink temperature for me is right around 115F suricata, openvpn and ntopng running

Finally got around to working on this after the 6 port version i recently got were of no use due to the screw that was supposed to hold the m2 ssd post would not come off the post. To the point I striped the screw top... So... found this 4 port version that I bought months ago. Installed pfsense, and it looks to be ok. The cooling fins feel pretty warm, though. So Im leaving a 4 star for now. Lets see if this holds up with the heat.

I didn’t have any problems running this box with opnsense. Everything worked out fine configuring as a firewall.

I bought this for use as a firewall because it has four built in network ports, and is smaller than my network switch. Even though it is running a slow processor, it still has more horsepower than I need for running pfsense. The box does get warm to the touch, running in the low 40s C for a temperature. The thing I like best is that it just keeps running. Pfsense works extremely well with this hardware.

The heat is a big problem, I dont care how good of heat sink it has.

performance good for home router

I didn’t have any problems running this box with opnsense. Everything worked out fine configuring as a firewall.

A top-rated review says that this box can’t run VPNs faster than 100Mbps up, 100Mbps down. That’s not true; running OpenWrt, I got 700Mbit/sec iperf3 up/down using WireGuard®️ in a live test over Verizon FiOS to an quad core endpoint at packet.net. With a machine this fast, you will expose weaknesses in the other VPN endpoint, and in the network in the middle. You may also expose performance problems in your VPN implementation; OpenVPN can be quite slow.

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.

My Protectli Vault FW4B has its mSata screws locktight/glued from the factory. This makes zero sense considering you have to install your own storage. The screws used are very low quality and strip immediately. Buyer be warned.