Protectli Vault FW6A Firewall Micro Appliance/Mini PC - 6 Port, Intel Dual Core, AES-NI Barebone Review

WOW. This is a great piece of equipment. I ordered the pre-built version of this vs the bare-bones version.I installed CentOS 6.9 using a USB stick. The install went very well and there appears to be no issues during reboot that another reviewer remarked about.This is solid and a bit larger and heavier than I expected (not a bad thing). I think that is because it is a metal case - rather than cheap plastic that you would have expected.The heat sink (case) is warm to the touch, but not hot at…

This item was received as clearly an open box item (torn and empty hardware bag, hastily packaged) which is a first between me and Revain but seems to be working so far. Running PFSense and am pleased with the performance I'm seeing. The product appears to be very well constructed and very well suited for a variety of applications.

This thing is sturdy. Really nice heavy build. I bought this to build into a router and it is great. Only after I realize I should have gone with a cheaper 4 NIC protecli box and a switch.

I'm extremely pleased with this product. I've had almost no issues (will get into that below, but it was comparatively minor) with this since I bought it lasat year, and it has been on 24/7 since I recieved it with no freezes/crashes (acting as an Untangle NGF for a 300Mb/s WAN connection).Starting a little over a week ago, I had a single NIC start failing on me (my acting WAN port), and within 24 hours of opening a support ticket and exchanging some details, I have a replacement on the way to…

Nice performance improvement over my older 4-port unit. Once I installed PFSense, I simply imported the configuration from my old setup and made a few adjustments for the slight changes to accommodate the interface differences. Was up and running in under 15-miuntes once I had installed all of the hardware.

I have these, I purchased them as an experiment to learn OpenVPN and pfSense firewalling. They are clever little boxes and you can make a pretty amazing router/firewall out of them. I used Celeron processors in mine and they seem to be quite adequate for doing high-performance VPNs.

Like other reviewers I'm very impressed with the Protectli FW6A in terms of size, performance and build quality.This device provides professional grade capabilities that I needed beyond my Ubuquiti EdgeRouter Lite (which is also a pretty decent high performing device). My FW6A purchased after seeking some model advice from Protectli (big shout out to Brent) and was fulfilled by Revain.I got my FW6A set up and running very nicely using one outside and three inside ports. There were a few…

These little things are amazing, I'm using this as a complete overkill home router / server and it's *awesome*, best router I've ever owned. If you're tired of dealing with firmware and just want a router which is a real computer so you can run NixOS / Debian / FreeBSD / whatever on it, get this.I'm running mine with the 2.4ghz wifi module purchased separately and a 5ghz USB wifi dongle. If somebody would just make dual radio wifi chipsets for PCs it would be *perfect*, but using two separate…

Decided on this after researching many of the low-cost options for my SOHO and I'm glad I did. While I was also considering the Qotom as well as re-purposing a retired pc no longer being used, this purchase will certainly save a little in energy expenses over a pc. Quality built and has been rock-solid for the past month.

I've been a die-hard fan of Ubiquiti gear and have been using my EdgeRouter Pro-8 for a few years. It's a very reliable router and the configuration learning curve has been fun and challenging at the beginning. As much as I like the EdgeRouter, it has its limitation and something just doesn't seem to work, such as the L2TP and OpenVPN (which is a pain in the behind to configure).A few months earlier, I have been hearing some good things about pfsense so I have started digging up some YouTube…

1st -- to understand the company -- go to their website. They explain all the different micro server devices they produce. It is much more helpful that just browsing on Revain.2nd -- they stand behind their products and you get real people who understand their products when you contact them (again through their support portal). I was really shocked at the level of support I got as it was absolutely the best I have gotten from any company on Revain. Within an hour of filing a ticket I got a…

Brought this to try out Pfsense. I added a Crucial 8GB (260 pin) dual channel memory, and a Transcend 128GB mSata drive.This device has been stable for weeks since I put pfsense on it. Pfsense was a little hard to figure out at first. I recommend buying this plus a network switch.

The system is great but there is room for growth. The lack of documentation and quick guides on configuration is a dangerous pair. I did not know what type of memory the unit needed, I did not know what the parameters of the hard drives that could be configured with. I also had a hard time to figure out what website to go to for additional information.I finally loaded it with pfsense and configure the system as a firewall so it will be a little more time for me to tweak the hardware and…

This is a solid little box. Very well made. I had no issues configuring it to run pfsense and it ran flawlessly for a month. However, it does run hot. Not excessively so, but I did add an external fan to keep the processor temperatures down. I was running mid to high 50’s C until the fan. Now temps run mid-40s C. After a month I started to see pfSense restarts and lock ups. Not good. I’ve read someplace that memory and SSD can sometimes be issues. I haven’t yet swapped these components out. So…

I got this to replace a dated (no AES encryption support) and power hogging desktop that I used as my pfSense firewall.I bought this appliance along with a 32GB mSATA drive and 8GB of RAM.I backed up the config on my old firewall, installed pfSense on this hardware and restored the config. The process went pretty much without issue. The only intervention required was mapping the Networks to the new physical adapters and (optional) configuring RAMdisks for logs to save wear on the SSD. I also…