Vault FW4C - 4 Port, Firewall Micro Appliance/Mini PC - Intel J3710, 2.5G Ports, AES-NI, 8GB DDR3 RAM, 120GB SSD

I am using this device for two months with PFSense and it is working flawlessly. My network is quite complicate with different site-to-site VPNs and heavy internet/wifi use but still 0 problems! Highly recommended!

Takes a bit of working out , but works well

My old pfSense router/appliance was rebooting and having issues sporadically. I ended up replacing it with this unit and have not had any issues. The Protectli Vault FW4C is a solid little firewall box—fanless, silent, and packed with 4x 2.5G ports. It runs pfSense or OPNsense smoothly for basic routing, VLANs, and light VPN use. The J3710 CPU and 8GB RAM are fine for home or small office setups, but may struggle under heavy loads like deep packet inspection. If you want a reliable, low-noise box for DIY network security, this is a great pick—just don’t expect enterprise-level performance.

Protectli Vault is a Mini PC that can easily be setup to run the more popular Unix variants around including FreeBSD, Ubuntu, OpenBSD, Linux and as far as I can tell, can even run some versions of the Citrix XenServer Hypervisor. It does not have a TPM chip onboard so if you want a Windows 11 system or Windows Server, you might want to consider and research Protectli's Vault Pro (VP) series. Once the operating system is up and running, you can run any service you like on it including firewall/IPS, email server, database server, LDAP server and so on. The 4 port 2.5Gbps speeds means that the appliance can scale when the network is upgraded above the current gigabit network. That's 2.5Gb support on the WAN interface to your ISP! Support for OpenVPN and WireGuard just means this appliance can easily have a VPN configured in a site-to-site configuration or it can simply be used as a client to a VPN provider that connects your entire home/office over a single VPN connection rather than every device having to establish its own VPN channel. I did exactly what others have done, plugged a monitor into the HDMI port (you can also opt to connect via the RJ45 console port), plugged in a keyboard and boot into an operating system/software install. At this stage, I am running OPNSense (firewall) with its Suricata IPS build (intrusion prevention) and Adware Home (privacy). I will probably play around with it some more to add a site to site VPN at some stage. With all these key services along with core services such as dhcp, cron, ntpd, etc, the Vault runs at a steady 39C/102F, chews up 3% consistently with the occasional spikes going up to 40%+ CPU utilisation. You can run everything off a graphical user interface for most Unix variants and firewall products such as OPNSense but eventually you will need to jump into issuing commands via a shell interface. Highly Recommended.

Wordt gebruikt in plaats van mijn Ubiquiti USG die toch wel veel beperkingen had ten opzichte van PFsense op deze Protectli. Mooie nette solide box. Zeer tevreden mee

Really excellent product, don't be afraid to buy one. I used the hdmi port to get initial video access with keyboard in usb port. Things set up well, installed pfSense, got access over the network to the web GUI and went from there.

I bought this mini PC for being 100% compatible with OPNsense. All BIOS settings were mostly set correctly and did not have to change anything yet. Installing OPNsense was super easy, I downloaded the video vs serial version since I wanted to make sure HDMI port works and also I observed RS232 mirrored output. CPU is perfect for this device, not too powerful requiring active cooling, but powerful enough for advanced networking configuration. Bonus Intel CPU does AES in hardware. Swapped out my ASUS router/AP for this and repurposed the ASUS as an access point since the Wi-Fi radios worked great. VLANs and DDNS did not seem to affect performance and heatsink temperature never was hot, always just warm. More experimentation to hammer the device is coming next. I would not hesitate to buy another one! Completely happy with this device!