Vault FW4B - 4 Port, Firewall Micro Appliance/Mini PC - Intel Quad Core (Celeron J3160), AES-NI, Barebone - Compatible with pfSense/OPNsense etc

The barebones Protectli Vault is a fantastic piece of kit for anyone getting in to building their own firewall / router. You need to buy your own RAM and mSATA storage. Buying the barebones kit and getting the RAM and storage separately can work out cheaper than buying it includes, but you run the risk of compatibility issues. I settled on 8GB RAM and a 128GB storage drive and have had no issues.The device is delivered with the AMI bios flashed. If you buy directly from Protectli, you have the choice of AMI (similar to what would be on your normal computer) or Coreboot. AMI works with a lot more hardware but Coreboot has the advantage of being completely open-source. There's some discussion over whether Coreboot brings with it a slight performance increase but I haven't been able to prove it one way or another. I did choose to flash Coreboot to my Vault. This was an easy process of running a live USB with Ubuntu and following the instructions on the Protectli website. The process was a breeze and worked immediately.Once this was complete, I installed OPNsense. The process was as simple as following the install guide on their website. In theory, since this is an x86 platform, you could run almost any OS. Both pfSense and OPNsense work fantastic on the Vault.My Vault has been up for a few weeks now. It's running a number of VLANs with a DHCP server for each. I don't use it for IDS/IPS but plan to in the future. The system has been rock solid and I'm getting the full throughput my ISP advertises. The system idles around 2-3% CPU usage and occasionally spikes to 20% when changing settings in the web interface.Overall, the Vault (FW4B) has been excellent. You certainly don't need 128GB storage, but I'd suggest extending to 8GB RAM if you can afford it since most firewall operating systems load in to RAM when they boot, although 4GB minimum would suffice. This has been a fantastic upgrade to an old desktop running pfSense, the stability is unparalleled and price to performance is absolutely worth it. Whilst the upgradability is limited due to the form factor, the extremely low power draw of the integrated system makes it entirely worth it.I have absolutely no complaints regarding this product and thoroughly recommend it to anyone running a home lab or small to medium business.

Unlike previous reviewers, I am a home enthusiast for tech stuff. In the caseof routers, I've come from well known hardware flashed with enthusiast softwareso a bit geeky but not professional. With the router manufacturer yet againstopping development and no doubt soon stopping support of my latest router, Ilooked for a different solution and spotted OPNsense as being useful for me.Being based FreeBSD, OPNsense has limited hardware support and that was the keycriterion for selecting the Protectli FW4B - it was designed to work withOPNsense. FreeBSD appeared unlikely to support wifi; no problem for me as I runa separate wifi box.On unboxing, it has to be said the FW4B did look workmanlike enclosed in aheatsink rather than being the latest router fashion. The FW4B needed RAMadding which was slightly fiddly to locate, SSD adding which was simple and aUSB keyboard to poke it into action. I had to buy a keyboard as the alternativeserial method failed to work for me. A big plus for Protectli is the onlinedocumentation, which clearly took me through these setup procedures.OPNsense proved straightforward to install on the FW4B, no more difficult thanre-flashing a consumer router. I've added a few plugins for extra features withno problems and the FW4B mostly loafs along at less than 1% cpu usage runningall this stuff.I've now run the FW4B as a domestic router for 3 weeks and it has been entirelyreliable to date. If it continues to be reliable, over some years, I shallconsider the money well spent.Edit 1 Jan 24: The Protectli Vault FW4B has performed flawlessly for over a year now, with no problems whatsoever. I have been able to update the OPNsense software on a routine basis, without the FW4B complaining; it has remained 100% reliable. It even survived a nearby lightning strike which tripped my 230 volt circuit breaker. I'm more confident running the FW4B as a router than I ever was with the usual consumer router, especially when away from the house.

I never write reviews so this deserves special appraisal. I am a Linux and networking engineer by trade and this is being used in a complex homelab, to say the least. I'm very impressed.TLDR: Ping is down 1.6ms, my DMZ is completely usable, the box does not get as hot as other reviewers say, and throughput is strong at near line speed. The build feels very sturdy and the casing is rock solid.I had long-running issues running pfSense as an edge firewall sandwich with a fully fledged DMZ network. The issues running it virtualised originated from either software RSC settings, spurious TCP re-transmissions/out of order packets, random ICMP messages and possibly VMQ issues too on the VM. This slowed down traffic so badly the DMZ was unusable, despite the appropriate offloading settings being present in pfSense and on the virtual switches. Ping time wasn't great either, and network jitter was huge when throughput was high.A month later and I decided my homelab can do with a physical device to get better performance. The candidates were enterprise gear on eBay like an ASA or Fortigate F60, a Netgate SG2100 or Protectli's FW4B.I ruled out the legacy enterprise gear as with firewalls, you want regular updates. Not great, unless you want to pay thousands for licensing. Netgate seemed overpriced when comparing raw hardware specs like-for-like.This was product I chose in the end. It wasn't cheap and I spent £60 on a 256GB mSATA disk and 4GB memory (cheaper than the ready-to-go version) and I was very impressed when I'd rebuilt my network to use this device.One thing needs further investigation. pfSense didn't pick up my mSATA disk when plugged into the first slot. I moved it into the other one and it worked fine. This might have been due to reseating, or maybe due to a fault. It is not important enough to investigate this as I would not run this with two disks anyways.

It's a really good low in firewall if you want something simple I wanted to virtualize my firewall and run a ad blocker on it but it doesn't support virtualization. Which is fine it did the job it needed to very very well just not in the way that I would like to have had it handled.Like I said if you're looking for a simple appliance to run a firewall or some other network software. This thing's awesome

Male, ale velmi efektivni, slaby navod.

Works perfectly, sturdy solid build.

This product is NOT fully compatible with Pfsense or OPNsense. During the installation procedure you can choose from several keyboard maps (Belgian, French, Italian etc) but none of them work. So configuring an Azerty keyboard via the installer is not possible. The same installation software does install correctly on other appliances so there must be an incompatibility. I contacted Protecli and they are aware of the problem.

I was waiting to buy this lovely piece after many readings about the performance, and when I received it was a big shock.I had already a VM with 1 CPU and 4 GB RAM performing way more better than this tank, the speed of the internet was 80% reduced with a basic routing without installing any single application, while my VM is giving me 10% decreased speed with OpenVPN and pfblocker...It got hot also easily, the temperature got high above 50 degrees in normal operation.I am returning it because of the price, it is quiet expensive comparing to other brands and at the same price after buying the RAM and the mSATA, I can build a mini itx pc with proxmox server running pfsense and openmediavault having 2 TB cloud.