Firewall Micro Appliance With 6x Intel Gigabit Ports, Intel i5 7200U, AES-NI, Barebone

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Amazing Product. My old PFsense hardware died and I was looking for an all-in-one kind of package. Buying ram/hdd was easy with given specs. Thing is FAST. Took me a little while to find which m2 slot to put the HDD as it wasnt specific. It points to the website. Why not just say that its the one on top? Anyway, its amazing to me how I can turn on IPS/NAT/bandwidth D/etc, etc and this thing is still giving me 1.2 gpbs WAN throughput. Doesnt even make sense. I have 1 gbps docsis 3.1 internet with cat 5e wired around the house. I should max out at 1gbps. Whatever! (tested on speedtest.net / fast.com with same results in both). Super happy with the performance with a lot of things turned on in pfsense. I did get the i5 version and updated the BIOS to current (as of 4/15/18) before installation.

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It is really a true compact multi-port powerhouse, hardly bigger than an appletv unit yet it puts to shame alot of network vendors and their kit. Expecting shady quality but now I’m actually running several units loaded with pfsense / carp as a fully redundant solution.

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Good design. Great solution for a homebrew firewall/router. I used Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS (Server Edition) and set up a PfSense VM and a bridge on the LAN side. My WAN runs at 1 Gbps (verified), but even after optimizing the kernels I could only get about 650 Mbps throughput. I’m okay with that! I have bought a few fanless PCs from CompuLab (Intense PC2 and AirTop) and this one is smaller, cheaper, and more compliant to open standards.

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Ive got one of these units to replace an older Netgate SG-2440 system that was not able to drive more than 530Mbps downstream on a Gigabit line, and 55Mbps on an IPSec line. With this machine I can easily do 940Mbps for Speedtest.net, about 120Mbps on IPsec. On the previous router the CPU utilization was 85% when doing a benchmark over IPSec. The new machine runs at 13% CPU utilization. To complete the installation I got the RAM and mSATA drive below. • Crucial 8GB Kit (4GBx2) DDR4 2400 MT/S (PC4-19200) SR x8 Unbuffered SODIMM 260-Pin Memory - CT2K4G4SFS824A • Samsung 860 EVO 250GB mSATA Internal SSD (MZ-M6E250BW) Adding the memory and the mSATA drive were a breeze. One nitpick: in documentation that comes with the package please note which port is designed for mSATA instead of sending the user to the website to look it up. For future reference, the top port is for the mSATA drive, the bottom one is for the WiFi card. I setup pfSense to work over the serial console, and the installation worked like a charm. I backed up the old pfSense machine, changed the name of the Ethernet devices from igbN to emN in the config file, uploaded the backup file on the system, and everything worked! Another nitpick for users that never intend to hookup a monitor to the device. Please change the default BIOS setting to have the power button trigger a power down only if its held more than 4 seconds. Right now any accidental touch of the power button will shut off the machine, not fun. One suggestion for improvement: instead of using a custom serial cable, itd be great to be able to use a regular USB cable. I loved that feature with Netgate, and hated it on the previous Soekris machines I used. Its too easy to misplace the cable, not to mention the need for a special USB to serial cable.

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This has made a fantastic untangled firewall. Able to replace a mid-tower with this

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