SG-5100 Security Gateway Appliance with pfSense Plus Software

The unit is a solid performer, although it cannot provide 1G speeds when using plugins such as Snort or Suricata for IDS/IPS , Dont purchase if you are wanting to have any kind of IDS or complex firewall. Average throughput with protection running as about 200Mb.

I bought this for my house with symmetrical gigabit to resolve the strain of needing home office quality routing while still allowing heavy personal usage like torrents. This device is about as top end as one needs for symmetrical gigabit links. I can fully host a secured DMZ, blast torrents, and fully maintain clean connections for critical work from home video conferences or chatting with Grandma. I had two setup gotchas. First I didn't realize that only port zero would be on the network initially and that the other ports weren't switching. Second, because my provider was expecting my old router's MAC address the Netgate box took a very long time to, I assume timeout and then, start up DHCP and web services. Because I didn't have a WAN link I thought the device was bricked. Finally after 30 minutes or so the system started up. I noticed in the UI that my WAN link didn't have an address. After clicking around I thought to spoof the old hardware MAC and that got everything going. After the hiccups everything has been impressive. I had one final surprise that I should have understood but didn't. The ports aren't switching. I thought I would put several rooms through each of the ports but instead I got a bigger backend switch and was good off the single uplink. As I mentioned, resolving my uplink's lack of DHCP by MAC spoofing the old routers is a big plus as I didn't need to call the ISP. The spoofing menu was clean and gave me a taste of how wonderfully diverse the boxes offerings are. Otherwise I'm beyond extremely impressed with what services are available. The internal DNS service just works and is nice if you need an DMZ address to resolve tonam otherwise external domain. The contextual documentation is spot on, open, and thorough. Everything is very accessable via menus and overall the pfsense offering is perfected in the netgate hardware. Other than those starting pains this box exceeded my expectations and met the price point. This box is perfect for the power home network operator.