 In February of 2019, I reviewed the NuttGate SG-1100 Firewall. I really like this box. I want to do a follow-up a few months later and talk about the pros and cons. Pros. It has all the wonderful features at PF Sense and I have a plethora of videos that talk about how to use any of those advanced features like, you know, whole home VPN or selective policy routing and every bell and whistle, including if you wanted to do an HA with these, you could actually do it with these tiny little boxes. So you will have full feature complete PF Sense. The downside, if you have a connection over 500 megs, and that's why I like to put this being a video, if you're someone who's going, I have an 800 meg or a full gig connection fiber at my home, this is not the box for you, stop watching right now, that's, that's is a limitation. I will throw it out there. I would say anything over 500, you might want to look at something a little bit bigger. Still running PF Sense. PF Sense can certainly route that fast, but the hardware within this little box just doesn't do it. Now the box currently is still priced at $159 with a notice that there's going to be a price increase due to tariffs of September of 2019, it's September of 15th, 2019, it's going to go to $179. So they haven't had a dramatic price increase. But what I specifically want to talk about is I bought one of course for myself and for my staff and we've put a lot of these out there for, you know, a few different people and helped them configure them and things like that. And the solid performance, solid updates, the updates I've had no problems, really been a couple of version updates since then, not too many. And they've been a really trouble free box. But I want to talk about home routing with them. Are they a goodbye for that? Yes. So you can set up in your home all, once again, full features of PF Sense, you get a smart switch, a managed switch, and you would be able to then create VLANs because it only has a couple of ports in here, but you could use the two ports that it has for LAN or, you know, WAN failover, like I said, it's very flexible as far as options. Or you can follow one of my more advanced videos on how to build out all the VLANs and create a really segmented out network with a lot of security, with a lot of different rules on each network interface that you create. That's absolutely possible with these. But what about games? That is what, you know, I wanted my staff who plays more games than me. But of course, having it at home, my kids play games. My kids play a lot of Overwatch, Minecraft, and probably plenty of games I can't remember the names of through Steam and things like that. But this is where sometimes you run into a problem. The Switch has plenty of issues, and we'll start there. Not because of PF Sense, but because of the way they designed it. And a lot of these games are expecting, and the default option of PF Sense is off, to have you PNP turned on. That does include the Switch. Now, the Switch has a couple other things. If you Google Nintendo Switch and PF Sense, you'll find some solutions for static routing, and it's because they didn't design, in my opinion, the way Nintendo implemented the network stack in the Switch. It's, there's a problem with a lot of firewalls. There's a lot of little things you have to do to get it working properly. And PF Sense doesn't automatically or magically fix that either. But as far as all the other standard games, like I had mentioned, Overwatch, Minecraft, or any multiplayer games, provided you're willing to do the port mapping, it works. Or you can check the boxes for non-UPNP. Or you can create a separate network for your gaming computers, so you don't have to have the risk of UPNP turned on. Most of your consumer firewalls turn this on by default. And what that does is UPNP allows devices to automatically decide what ports get opening your network. From a security standpoint, this is terrible. From a home user who goes, I just want to play my games and I'm not worried about security. Well, turning it on by default makes more sense, so you don't have to log in there. I like that PF Sense gives you the option of doing it, and your ability to create separate networks means you could put all your gaming systems on a separate network where you don't have to worry about any of the potential security threats that come through through UPNP. But as far as performance goes, for myself, I have a 350-meg connection at home. I've been using this ever since February when I reviewed it. I had one actually before, then I already had it at my house. I was doing testing with it, but my kids, even multiple of my children playing at the same time, both playing Overwatch, including competitive play, which they seem to play a whole lot of, it's had no issues at all. It has worked really solid. It's been an excellent performer and not any problems. And I still recommend buying these. I think when you start adding it up, I mean, if you have a bunch of hardware laying around, awesome, you can build yourself one. I encourage people to get out there and experiment and put things together. But when you're looking for something that's turnkey, budget-friendly, and you don't have to worry about updates or any real process to loading it, not that I'm stopping those of you who want to tinker. I'm certainly not a deterrent for those. If you want to tinker and build your own, awesome. But if you're looking for a turnkey solution and just jumping into the software and programming side where you just want to learn some of the network engineering and play around with a firewall that has even at this tiny little size here an amazing amount of features from proxies to selective routing, policy routing, and VPNs, this is still hard to beat even with the price increase after September 15th of 2019 up to 179. You get a lot of power in a small box. Now for those of you asking, well, what do I do? I have a full one gig connection. Well, I do have over here the SG-3100. I think this is a good one here. Or of course you can go the self-built route. If you go even a basic system running PF Sense, that does not have to be anything very powerful, we'll route it gigabit. So if you were to build a system, find an older use computer, and I do say older, you can find a computer that's a few years old and still runs it, but do look for a chip that has AES and I in it. That is not a prerequisite to run PF Sense, but if you do any type of VPN, the AES and I is the offloading of the crypto that is built into a lot of modern processors. Well, I think it's been around for like eight years, so it's not hard to find an older computer that has it in there, and that enhances the VPN performance. So it's not a prerequisite and if you don't use VPNs, it's not gonna matter to you at all. But still a good choice. Well, the SG3100, if you're faster than 500 meg, if you only have a 500 meg connection, this still fits the bill, works really well. Now the VPN speed is not going to be, if you do a whole home VPN or a selective VPN where you have certain computers over it, and I've done videos on this, you know you're not gonna get the full performance. At some point there are some limitations. I believe the VPN in this limits you to roughly 70, 80 megs in real world. I think I can peek it out, we're doing simulated tests at like closer to 100, but real world I think you get about 70, 80 megs when you wrap everything in a VPN via this and then wrap the computers behind it within there. So maybe that's the problem for you. Maybe it's not. I prefer to actually run the VPN directly on my computer because it's fast enough to handle it at even higher rate of speed, but you do have the option to do this on here, maybe put some of your servers behind it if that's something you want to do. So I still think it's a good purchase. My follow-up of having used it, and of course my staff having used it, and one of the solutions they actually because the VPN support is in here is they built VPNs between their homes and that's actually plenty of speed to play video games. So building VPNs and building your own personal network so you can play peer-to-peer games without sharing it across the public internet. That's actually our cool feature and it did work fine if you my staff were doing that and playing some of the games. But other than having to turn UPNP on if you want to take that risk to get some of the games working fully, other than that it's been a solid product. It's a great performer and my review still stands as it did in February. I'm still really like this product. It's still what I'm using at home. And I just want to share that because a lot of people are always asking me what's a good home router to get. I still think this is a really good purchase even six months later. Unless you're lucky enough to have fiber and that whole good connection then you're gonna have to step it up a little bit if you want to get the take advantage of that speed. All right, thanks. And thank you for making it to the end of the video. If you liked this video, please give it a thumbs up. 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