Review on 🔒 Enhanced Security with Protectli Vault: 6 Port Firewall Micro Appliance/Mini PC - Intel Dual Core i5, AES-NI, Barebone by Darren Neal

I ordered an i5-2700U and paired it with 240GB MSSD and 16GB RAM. Overkill for what it's supposed to be, but I'm very glad I did. With a connection speed of 1GB running PfSense (and now OpnSense) with full IDS/IPS support, multiple blacklists and HTTP proxies for parental control VLANs, this thing is consuming a lot of that power! The downside of this setup is that it gets hot (but not too hot - in a closed network rack in a closet with little or no airflow, I see a maximum of 55-60°C, an internal case temperature and a mobile device temperature of 28°C). C) - and when updating PfSense the installation aborted which resulted in me reinstalling the whole box so I'm on OpnSense now and I'm glad I took the step. With 6 ports I have enough to have regular WAN/LAN ports + uplink to switch to VLANS with free ports when I decide to do more with my network. These things really didn't let me down in terms of hardware, always work reliably, are affordable and consume very little power under load. Protectli quotes power consumption as a maximum of 35W - I usually see it in the 18-20W range under load. So if you have a network rack with a UPS, don't add much. With an APC 1500VA UPS I can power a Protectli, a 24-port POE, an 8-camera POE security system, a PVR and a POE access point for almost 4 hours. During power outages in the weather, keeping an eye on storms was invaluable! The thing is a small power plant, at some point I was faced with the decision whether to stay with my own network or switch to the Ubiquity network and an important decisive moment. It was possible to spoof a Mac ID (for network access to my ISP, which the Ubiqiti Dream series of machines cannot do). But now, after tweaking with PfSense and without OpnSense, experimenting with plugins, reports and different configurations, I can say without a doubt if you are a techie, can work with Linux, understand networks and are willing to accept notifications through the application sacrifice – the device is combined with open source software to protect your network!