 Few people have asked me about the XG7100 from NETGATE and have I used them? Yes, but they don't usually pass through our office. This one I was lucky enough did. We usually ship them direct to clients or have the clients order them directly if we're part of a bigger internet network integration. But I have one new here and I can prove it's new and I wanted to share this moment with you guys of filling off the plastic. I don't know why it's white. It is, it comes with a white piece of plastic on there. And we're gonna talk about some of the features on this. Now, I've already taken most of the screws out, so I will take all the screws out and finish that off and talk about the XG7100 and why you want one. Now the debate always comes up. Should I build or to buy it? Should I build or to buy it? And one of the things when we're doing commercial support, I like warranties. I like support. So we go the route of we're going to buy it because once I deploy these somewhere, especially when we're selling these, we even saw these in other states and things like that. I don't got time to fly out there and worry about updates. So with this, I don't have to. I trust that the PF Sense updates will go quite well because it's a genuine NETgate product. Also, this comes in two versions. So the XG7100 comes in XG7100. I believe it's HA as the nomenclature to have on there, which all that means it's two of them at once and they come in an HA configuration. And people ask me a lot about HA configurations. If you're doing an HA, you want two identical PF senses. So in the case of buying an HA directly from PF Sense, you get two of this model or they have other models you can do HA with and other one-U racks, so they, you know, fit nice. They're well matched and away you go. Now, part of it that's a little bit confusing because the way they worded it is how does it support 10 gig? Does it support 10 gig? Because it says it doesn't have copper support. What they mean is I can plug in SFP modules such as a DAC cable and it supports that. It supports fiber. So you can have a fiber handoff. So it supports that. What it does not support is if you've seen the SFP modules that adapt it to 10 gig RJ45 connector, that is not supported per the documentation on this. I don't know if that's a driver problem. I don't know exactly why. I just know that it's not supported. So the handoffs to this have to be your standard SFP handoff, either fiber or DAC. Those seem to work perfectly fine for the 10 gig. Now, getting the 10 gig back out of it, we have the system on a chip. We have these two 10 gig ports, but then we have these eight ports over here. Kind of interesting how they did this. It has a five gig backplane. It has a pair of Marvel chips, two and a half gig each. So you can distribute the 10 gig, two and a half gig each to these depending on how you divide up the ports. They have details in a documentation, exactly how that works. And the same with the VLAN tagging. I've commented before on some of the other models. This is one of them. They actually divide up the system on a chip as a VLAN so you can parse things out a little bit differently. And this is the recent review I did of the SG-1100 by NETGate does this as well, as well as the SG-3100. This is a common design feature by dividing them out. So you have a logical chip on the board that supports more than a gigabit, but then the physical interfaces are one gig here and then up to 10 gig here. So if you have all those handoffs. So let's dig into the box a little and talk about what's inside. So let's start by taking a top-down look and look at all the ports on here a little bit closer. So we have the SFP modules right here, two USBs, a console and a USB 3, which I think is interesting. We have the reset button, a slightly recessed, but still I can hear it clicking. I can still put my finger over and get it to start for the power button. And like I said, SFP modules, well, you don't put them in backwards. They just go in like that. So pretty straightforward. So nothing real exciting here. But the console is interesting if you haven't used a console on these. They don't have a VGA, but you can do this via Windows or via Linux and connect to the console to everything from re-upload firmware to getting in the system to reset it when you've goofed something up beyond control over here where you can't get to the Web interface anymore. I may have done that in my experimentation from time to time. Now, when we're looking on the inside, we have two fans right here. So that's for the cooling of it, passively cooled heat sink on top here, four SATA ports, which is interesting. I guess if you have, there's room, there's screw mounts over here. So if you want to mount a hard drive in there, I guess you could, you know, if you want to do a bunch of logging and save those logs on here. But the memory is soldered on but expandable so we can add some more memory to this. And standard CR2032 battery right here, you know, pretty straightforward. But this is interesting too, because they have this riser. Well, not a riser, but a module so you can put a riser on this. So you could, they sell a couple different ones. I think you can find these on Amazon. But you want to adjust it so you can mount. And this is actually the front. This comes out. It's kind of hard to see at this angle. But you'd be able to take this out and put in another card. So if the eight one gig ports and the two 10 gig ports aren't enough, it does have that as an expansion option as long as you have a compatible card in there. It has the 150 watt power supply. There's a single fan inside the power supply at the back of the system right here. And there's an on off switch on the back to be able to turn that on and off. So you can, you know, make sure it shut down. Now the fan modules appear to be the third. I'm assuming you're thermally controlled because of the multi colored pins on them. So it's the four pin fan module. So if you ever have to replace these fans, they are on edge connectors and not soldered to it. But inside, like I said, nice, tight, clean, zip tied together so no wires are dangling. Easy to see everything easy to get to anything on here. Butternap, like I said, nothing, nothing overly significant about this from the internal specs. Like I said, plenty of room if you do want to expand and add a hard drive in here. But other than that, pretty straightforward and simple. But I do like that the fans would not be rocket science to replace. Just make sure you get four pin ones, which means they have the controls in them for that. So we had a look at the hardware and I'll talk about the specs of said hardware. This is a default system, the one that we had for my demo for this video and the one that we're delivering to the client. Just the eight gigs, 32 gigs on board for storage, a gig DDR4. And this has the Intel Denver 10 Denver 10 C 358 2.2 gigahertz four cores. And like I said, it's got two 10 gig ports and eight one gig ports on the Marvel switch uplinked at five. That's the part I actually want to focus on about how this works. Now, good news is lots of documentation. They have it all mapped out to give you the idea of how this works. And it may seem a little complicated at first if you use the completely independent logical ports. But this is not that complicated. Just a couple extra things you have to understand how it works. If you're interested or you can just use it. I'm always fascinated with the details of how these things work. So here's your two 10 gig ports. And then here's your two two and a half gig ports. They virtually map to ports nine and 10. And as it says internal use only. So ports nine and 10 don't exist at the physical on the outside of the box. So there's nothing you plug into. So you have SFP plus FSP plus so I X one I X zero. And then across the top ETH two, four, six, eight and ETH one, three, five and seven at the bottom. This is the physical like front panel how this is laid out when you're looking at it. Now what these are configured as is in a lag interface. So you have PF sense lag at five gig here. So it can pull from PF sense at five gig to these ports. And as I think I mentioned before, that means that there's not eight one gig spots that give you a full eight gigabit backplane. You have a five gigabit backplane. So you're only able to saturate up to five gigs based off what's coming off those SFPs at 10 gigs. So it's just something to note if you were ever trying to pull the data back out and you're not using the SFP port, it can only route back out of here up to five gigs versus when you use both SFP in and out, it would route at 10. Just a little side note of how you're doing in case you want to bond a few interfaces together or how reconfiguration you're doing. And the other side of that is how the VLANs work on this. So because it has those virtual ports, here's VLAN 4090 for WAN and 4091 for LAN. And it goes through these lag ports. Now because it's just going through the physical layer of the ports, so this is the untagged versus tagged. So by default, your ETH 1 is going to be your WAN and ETH 2, so on and so forth. The rest of those can be tagged to LAN. That is that way those can operate as a LAN interface. Now let's talk about how that looks. So normally you're used to maybe if you built your own PF sense having just logical interfaces for each one, when you don't, there's interface, under interfaces it shows up as switches. This is where you have that extra functionality to show the ports and show how the switches are on there. And this is how they look when you look at the ports on here. So you can see port, virtual ID, VLAN ID 4090 versus all these are tagged for 4091. And then we have the VLAN portion. Now this is separate to your interface assignments and then VLAN. So over here, we still have VLANs just like we do. And when we create a new VLAN interface, we choose the parent interface. We can still create VLANs on the SFP plus ports, but you choose lag. You notice how I don't have like a ETH 1 through or ETH 2 through 8 to pull ports for for my land. I have this. And when you're setting the parent interface, you're going to set as the lag interface because that's actually going to cover everything from WAN to LAN. So whatever you need to assign as VLAN. So once you do that, add a VLAN, I called it VLAN 30. It still has VLAN priority. I give it a description of guest. Then I still go over here to assignments and I assign VLAN 30 to the lag interface to actually activate the interface. I've covered VLANs before in PF sense, but you kind of get the idea, but this is the extra step that you need to take. So here are the default ones that are in here, 4090, 4091. And then here's the 30. Here's the one I added. And what I did was you add it to which member ports that you wanted to have it on there. And you have to include the virtual ones, a virtual hidden how internal ones, nine and 10 and add the tag to them. And what this allows it to do is pass through the lag interface, those VLANs over to the rest of the LAN port. So now the LAN defaults to the primary VLAN, but then it can also pull tag 30, for example, in this guest network. Well, other than that, it's really not too complex. It's an extra piece that you need to know when you're configuring this and setting it up that because the ports on here, all the ETH ports aren't just your standard one logical port, like if you build your own PF sense with a standard network card. So it's a little bit of a configuration difference when you're setting it up, but not that big of a deal. Once you've got that understanding, you can go through the rest. Performance wise, this is an excellent box. It'll run a full line speed a gigabit for things like sericata and such. So it's definitely really fast. It's still full PF sense. Of course, it has all the hardware crypto support and it's low reasonably low wattage low power. It's an excellent box. We even saw quite a few of these for clients. They're solid. They never gave us any trouble. And like I said, it's it's a well designed supported by neck eight product. So, you know, the updates are gonna work and everything else. But that's it for the review. After this, it's just PF sense after this. That's the only special feature I wanted to cover about when you get these. I had mentioned this before, some of the other neck eight devices also use similar system on a chip. So they also have some that same interface, you know, not just different design that you have to be aware of and things like that. And the good news is they have it all documented here. They have it documented for the 1100 things like that. So you can have a better understanding of how all that works. Alright, thanks. If you're looking to buy this head over to PF sense, I don't sell them. I'm not a affiliate or commission sales of PF sense. I'd add that in there. But if you have questions, concerns, you always can feel free to jump in our forums for discussions. But we're not really a pre sales discussion. If you just want to buy it, head over to neck eight and you buy it from them. Alright, thanks. Thanks for watching. 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