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New Zealand, Wellington
1 Level
727 Review
59 Karma

Review on πŸ”’ FortiGate-60F / FG-60F Network Security Appliance (Hardware Only) by Garon Tafolla

Revainrating 5 out of 5

Home internet devices are just bad. And this device shows why.

Former network engineer from centuries past - I was CCNA certified before CIDR even existed. Most consumer WiFi routers (Netgear, Linksys, Asus, etc.) that are also used to connect PC/Xbox are underpowered/crippled by the Broadcom chip (and others) and sometimes have software-switched ethernet! operating system; Linux with some binary firmware blobs (for Wi-Fi/Ethernet controllers etc.). OpenWRT seems better but still requires binary blobs. So the 60F I bought isn't a wireless router, it's an enterprise-class firewall that can behave like a router. It supports IPv4/6, NAT, IDS, Firewall etc. Supports OSPF, BGP, RIP, Multicast. However, the extras (IDS, antivirus) for this product are *not* cheap for the average home user. I'm sure there are similar providers (Sonicwall, etc.) that have cheaper options. Now for the replacement: My existing setup was Edgerouter. Ubiquiti products like ER are terrible (ER has hardware acceleration disabled by default and only recently decided to document that (?)). Was connected to Comcast Business and received IPv4/IPv6 via DHCP. Normal setup for home users. The Netgear R7800 wireless router was connected to counter 0 in the emergency room. (R7800, as a consumer router, basic. Bad. And slow. The GUI has no advanced features compared to other vendors using the exact same Qualcomm radios.) Unboxing was easy, Comcast hooked up to Wan1 and then the computer on "Port 1" - DHCP is already configured and immediately has access to the Internet. Had to do some post configuration to get it working the way I wanted with IPv6, DNS servers on the LAN etc. This device has 8 processors, hardware accelerated Ethernet switching, etc. Model Name: FortiGate-60FASIC Version: SOC4CPU: ARMv8 Number of Processors: 8RAM: 1918 MBEMMC: 3662 MB(MLC) /dev/mmcblk0 Hard Drive: n/a USB Flash: n/a and also the presence of SSH comes out of the box. Many general settings are available in the GUI. Fast (Ethernet hardware acceleration, switching, firewall/NAT, etc.). , DNS Blocking, Anti-Spam, etc.), SNMP, DHCP, NAT/SNAT, NAT64, Traffic Shaping/QoS, VLAN etc. full port saturation - unlike my R7800 which would show peak loads on large transfers that the WiFi performance - 10Gbps L3 forwarding performance - Can run gigabit + firewall. Cons: - IPv6 interfaces are not configurable/not shown in the GUI. You must use the CLI to set it up. Some things will /require/ the CLI (e.g. get hardware status) - Documentation for some things could be better. Get some cheap WiFi hotspots and use this device as a router. You'll never look back

Pros
  • Router
Cons
  • Exorbitant prices