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

I have pfsense installed and been using it as my Primary Firewall/Router for the past 3 year. It has been great, I did mess up the configuration 1 time which gave me headache for half a day. Luckily i had backup of my previous configuration so it was just a matter of pfsense reinstallation and restoring the back up.

The box could have done with a convective heat transfer element since it feels a little hot for cloistered storage. The OPNsense initial configuration has some default assumptions but there is always the folks in Tech Support if you are not the type to read the manual online.

The appliance was very easy to get up and running with pfsense. Took me less than 10 minutes to install and setup a basic configuration. It was running fine for a couple of days and then pfsense started logging kernel cores. The system would restart itself and work without issue for a day or 2. That is until it continually started coring when attempting to load the wan interface.

Great product for a firewall / router combo.

Died after a couple of weeks of use.

llego de forma impecable, cumple con lo que se ofrece

Im using the Protectli Vault FW4B 8GB RAM, 120GB mSATA SSD as a firewall appliance for my extensive home network. It has enough horsepower to handle several people in the household watching video, a total of 35 clients on my gigabit network, a VoIP phone system, an at-home business and inbound and outbound VPN service. I bought model with the larger RAM and SSD drive for plenty of buffering and network storage space. The PFSense community edition software is free and easy to download and write into the firewall appliance. Using a keyboard and display, the basic bring-up is easy. Once the basic firewall is active, the more advanced features of the PFSense firewall sofware can be overwhelming at first for an intermediate IT professional. I use the firewall software to VPN through my Internet provider as well as offering remote access VPN sever to my network and file share. In my setup, the firewall appliance sits between my cable modem and a managed switch and my WiFi router (which has been re-configured to be an access point). The firewall appliance serves as a router with DHCP complete with VLANs for segregating traffic. The Protectli FW4B will definitely work for a large household and a small business.

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.

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.

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.