ProtectliVault FW2B - 2 Port, Firewall Micro Appliance/Mini PC - Intel Dual Core, AES-NI, 4GB RAM, 32GB mSATA SSD

Solidly built, works great. Two points you should note while initially getting it to boot BEFORE pfSense is installed:1. It didn't like my Logitech wireless keyboard/mouse combo - long BEEP at POST. Dug my one wired keyboard left out of the spare equipment bin and then got past that.2. It didn't like the 1960x1024 monitor I first attached and would display anything during boot. Switched to an old 1280x1024 monitor and it worked.Neither a keyboard or monitor are needed once you have pfSense installed and configured, but thought I'd pass this along in case someone else hits the same issues.

Honestly I would have never of known to get this equipment if it wasn’t for my IT guy that does our business. He told me what to buy and took care of me. Took him a couple hours to fully set this firewall appliance along with unifi switch and other goodies for my home. Security is a lot more extensive than what you get from your standard modem box.WiFi signal is always great and no issues. What’s great with my set up is that I can disconnect it all and set it up wherever I want and it’ll work perfect. Anyways, get this and someone who knows what they are doing and you’ll have a sweet setup for home office.

I bought this for pfsense and its been working like a charm. Much better than virtualized!

No complaints about the CPU speed, I knew what I was buying. That said, networking on this box is SLOW. Passing traffic at 13 instead of something over 40 or 50 (which this CPU should handle) is kind of a deal-breaker for me. I have another Protectli similar to this one (FW4B) but older with 4 network ports instead of 2 and has the Celeron J3160 (which is overall rated slower than this one but has 4 cores) and it can handle up to 560mbps of network traffic in my testing. This one, having a slightly faster CPU with half cores I figured would do fine as an internal router for playing around with and trying stuff out/learning on. I started handing files from one machine to another through it at one point and got speeds of 11 to 13mbps. Ridiculous. Faster CPU than my other mini, same memory and network connection specs as the other, but much slower when it comes to handling traffic.Don't know what I'm going to do with this thing now. I'm not even certain it would make a decent doorstop. Disappointed all the way around. I think in the future it would generally be wise to shy away from the Celeron based units and look for i3's or something beefier than these. It may well end up being a waste of horsepower (and perhaps money) as a router/firewall, but for the times when you need that horsepower it'll certainly be there. I'm just not seeing the bang for the buck with this one. Maybe taking it to the max with 8GB of ram would make a difference, but I'm not sure it's even worth the few bucks to try that.

Bought this in order to install PfSense on it to increase the security off my network. Long time coming.I have it tucked under my desk sitting on a built in shelf and it runs cool with no issue, even when I'm hitting it hard with traffic. Runs IDS/VPN's/Streaming/Ect without issue while sitting around 25% cpu usage and 60% memory usage. Love this thing. Well worth the price.

A great firewall for the money. The Celeron J3060 is more then adequate to power to firewall. I'm not sensing any network performance problems while surfing the web behind the firewall (or using other utilities, like ssh and scp).I found the firewall software is important. pfSense is a very good choice because it is feature rich and easy to use. If you pick another distro, like IPFire, then you may not enjoy this firewall as much. In the past I used other firewalls, and pfSense was a pleasant surprise.

This device seems to run well with Untangle. However, it comes with a 32GB SATA drive and Untangle recommends 80GB so I decided to open it up and upgrade it. Rather than having a permanent mounting point, the bottom cover screws into brass standoffs attached to the system board. The board is attached to the case. The problem with this design is that brass standoffs never behave the way you want them to when you remove them. In my case, two of the covers screws were so tight in the brass standoffs that the standoffs themselves backed out of the system board instead of the cover screws coming out. Because of the depth of the unit, this puts everything on a bind forcing you to remove them a little at a time working your way around the case cover. Another cover screw was cross threaded into the brass standoff making it completely impossible to remove without damaging the standoff. Luckily I have extra laptop screws that fit to replace the screws that were damaged during removal, however I don't have brass standoffs the correct length so I now need to order them in order to put the cover back on.This can all be fixed with a simple change to the case design or by snugging the screws in by hand rather than with a power tool as they almost certainly were during assembly. I will probably be applying a little thread locker to the standoffs when I reattach them to the board to ensure that they do not back out inadvertently in the future.Edit:This item is described as having a 2.48 GHz processor but it reports as having a 1.6 GHz processor. Dropping review to 1 star.

Works great