Firewall Micro Appliance With 4x Gigabit Intel LAN Ports, 4GB RAM / 16GB mSATA

I've been running this box for a little over a month. Everything with the hardware was great but I believe the method they use for imaging these boxes is flawed. I had a lot of strange issues with failure to start services and ultimately the box froze and failed to boot. I reinstalled from USB and the box has been humming along. I suspect that they just clone the SSD from one machine to another with hardware variations resulting in a bad install.I would do the following:1) Buy a small USB stick and set it up with the pfSense installer2) Buy a VGA to HDMI converter on AMZN for $20.3) Reinstall the OS day one.4) Backup the .xml file early and often. Once you are setup backup the .xml and it can be restored in minutes.

Never used pfSense before, so there was a learning curve, but not a big one, as the GUI is decent enough to work with. Lots of optional plug-ins you can download, which makes it very flexible. The hardware handles the load fine (50Mb Internet connection at my home, handling wireless streaming and a few gamers at the same time). Nice option to be able to set separate rules for my add-on WAP that differ from my LAN rules. Be wary of SNORT, though. I added it as an intrusion detection/prevention assist, and It blocks pretty much everything out of the box. I thought it was my blacklist, initially, but after combing through the logs, it became clear it was SNORT blocking it. It takes about a week of tuning SNORT, but after that first week - 10 days, I haven't had to touch it again (takes time to recognize the false alerts so you can silence those rules).Nice, small package, and four 1Gb ports at a decent price. I use three of the four ports, and will likely make the 4th one a DMZ or lab VLAN. It's nice to have options. Overall, I'm pleased with the purchase. Haven't seen any slow-downs or other performance issues. I have seen the flexibility in the software, which truly is a professional firewall software package that offers solid protection above what you'll get with most consumer routers. The free blacklist databases out there work very nicely with pfSense, allowing you to pick categories to block (a parental necessity to keep the young ones safe). This saves a lot of money, so the cost of the appliance, itself, is easy to rationalize. It also can block ad servers and viruses on the way in. Nice. The software to do all of these things, alone, for all the PCs in my house, would cost more than the appliance (and would be a management nightmare - I much prefer managing one appliance vs. multiple PCs).The appliance is dead quiet, and doesn't use nearly the power that a PC with a Linux install would use. Since it's on 24/7, this saves quite a bit of energy in a year. It runs mildly warm (located in my basement), but hasn't gotten warm enough to be of any concern. Since the metal exterior IS the cooling for it, I'd expect it to be warm (it's fanless), or would be concerned it's not doing its job. The unit seems well built, and was easy to set up.Haven't found any reason to knock it down a star, so five stars so far!

I replaced a Verizon FIOS Actiontech router with this. The main reason for the swap was that I could not get the Verizon router to pass the necessary traffic through to my Synology NAS running an OpenVPN server. Verizon was supplying my service over ethernet from my ONT, so the swap was pretty easy. I just released the DHCP IP from the Actiontech, moved the ethernet cable to the Protecli device and powered it on. I was up and running in minutes.The device is fan-less, but it still runs fairly cool. It is only slightly warm to the touch. The pfSense interface is light years ahead of the Actiontech it replaced. I was able to setup the OpenVPN server on the firewall directly and can now manage my home network securely.

So far I like this device. This arrived same day my 24 port switch had ports fail. Which made for interesting day. The metal case it's designed to dissipate heat. There are 8 screws that hold it together. You have to take them all out to get to the inside if your wanting to add a wifi stick. Screws are very tight so use the correct sized philips driver. One corner screw hole is a miniscule off but the screw will go in with appropriate force. The card doesn't have a hold down screw so the top of the case holds it down in place. Don't like that too much but unless I drop it there should be no issues there. Took some time to figure out how to set up Wi-Fi in the pfsense settings. After several hours I got the steps figured out. Don't over think it. After you have it working with WAN and LAN, DHCP in interfaces, assign just add another interface (OPT1) with the available MAC address that looks like you WiFi card. You can rename it later. Add an IP that is out of the subnet but similar to your LAN. For example, LAN=192.168.1.1 Wi-Fi (OPT)=192.168.2.1 complete the other settings that match your card specs. Now go to DHCP, then Wi-Fi turn on DHCP. Forget about bridging, not necessary for just Wi-Fi connectivity.Follow up. I suggest you reinstall of pfsense when thou get it. Notice it is fairly warm to the touch but not hot. I'm not running any extra packages. I gave up on the side card and just bought me a wifi access point (Unifi). Toughest part for me was setting up firewall port forwarding. Solid device, glad I bought it.EDIT: ports died on it after 2 years and nearly $300 I'm VERY dissatisfied, will NEVER, EVER buy from this vendor, maker again. Not glad I bought it.

Continually having issues with this device and it's functionality despite fully wiping and reloading PfSense. Thought it would work good due to having Intel NICs. Tried to contact the company twice through there website / email (the ONLY method of contact they allow) and heard nothing. I bought 3 of these, which will be the last 3 I buy. Going with Zotac for now on which is much, much better quality and works flawlessly despite non-Intel NIC's.