 So I've reviewed these in the past. These are the passively cooled. I believe it's pronounced protect telly firewalls and they make really nice little PF sense boxes this one's pretty slick. This is their newest model now their old models were really popular They're nice, but they don't have the AES and I support which means The potential future versions of software like PF sense won't be working on this also without the AES You lose some speed because it's that's a hardware decryption on there for things like VPN Anyways back to the product. So well, this is their latest one and right away. I'm impressed with it. It's it's heavy I don't have the exact ounces right here, but it also has six Intel eight two five eight three V ports This is a Celeron model. They have two models once an Intel series i3 the other one is a Celeron that's the one we have which is the 3865 you cavi lake 1.8 gigahertz now these ship with no memory in them So we ordered this no memory no msata That's how they ship they do have HDMI Comport which is kind of interesting for USB threes on the other side and a power button And I'll show you I'm going to show you the insides of this in just a second We're open it up, but the comports kind of interesting So if you want to use something like PF sense with the serial interface They ship you what looks just like a Old Cisco comm cable, which I haven't seen one of these in a little while But if you if you're some of the older Cisco products They they offered a comm cable that has what looks like an RJ 45 on one end But is actually just a standard serial port on the other so that's in the box The adapter comes in the box and it's a 4 3.3 amp at 12 volts so 40 watt adapter Standard power cord doesn't feel like one of those cheap ones. It's actually a little bit thicker The SATA cable, which is nice because you can plug in SATA or msata And I'll show you that in a second how that works and this little adapter and its adapters important as well because When you look inside here, you'll see how it gets the power now. It also comes with a mounting plate I like the way the mounting plate works because the plate I'll get out of the back here When you do the plate you just bolt it right to the wall You don't have to figure out a pattern and then it's got these and they have it's hard to see I'll do a close-up here, but these have a ability to go into the bottom of this and in these holes and to slip into the plate so you can easily wall mount this like to the Backboard All right, let's open it up and take a closer look So now that we're inside we can see that we have the Intel chips here for the this is part of the controller For the network interface to DDR4 slots for putting memory in and here's our SATA connector And this is where that SATA power connector comes in that they shipped with it, too So the SATA power connector actually plugs in right here So now if you want there, but you're probably asking do you just leave a drive loose in there? Nope, they solve that on the bottom They have this right here standard adapter so you can put a SATA hard drive in there I'm sorry or SATA not mSATA, but a standard laptop two and a half inch hard drive mount So if you don't want to use the mSATA mounts you can use these right here so that's a pretty slick way to do it and With two memory slots it's expandable up to 32 gigs of RAM So that's pretty clever also if you notice they glued each of the screw holes down And part of the reason why is because a CPU is on the other side of this I'm not going to take it apart. I don't want to avoid any warranties, but By doing that they have made it this really heavy heat sink and you can see from the sides and not not Like I said, this is a really well made heat sink and it dissipates the heat really really well We actually got two of these one of them We already had testing for a couple days and this is the second one so we can do some tests between each other We're gonna do some VPN testing here in a minute, but so far it's held up really well We've put it through some tests and we're gonna start covering it here in a second and do some performance testing on it But it's really well built like it's real solid. It doesn't feel like cheap at all It's all metal. So this is metal metal and even the back plate once again all still Tap it by the microphone. You can hear it's a it's a very solid not flimsy piece of metal It's not it's actually not even flexible. It doesn't bend or I mean I could but it's not it's not bending easily I should say The screws and everything really nice the way the fine-throwed screws go in there. It also has down here a buzzer so if the OS supports it making it beep on boot or anything like that that is supported on there and it's got Something so I can do the beep on there. So it's like I said so far really well made it I mean these things aren't cheap and they don't feel cheap either So sometimes you pay a lot for things and yeah, they don't feel as good But we were been happy we've deployed a lot of the other protectellies and they have held up really well over time All right, so let's get into the software testing any an important part is functionality says hey things can look cool But we really care about how functional they are working wise. So I got the box hooked up and ready I got my bootable USB in here rate a load PF sense on this and I want to give you a look at the bios on it And I don't have an HDMI input for this. We're just going to look at it this way So delete ten are set up like many most computers Pretty straightforward older style bios shows the Intel Celeron Got some options in here for changing settings all kinds of details actually quit it quit even more options than I expected you can Into Intel virtualization is actually in this too, which is kind of cool And you can turn it on or off and the default is on so if you're gonna do something other than pf Center sets in virtualization CPU management control Power turbo options. I'm leaving everything at default But that's just kind of give you a rundown though that there's a lot of different options in the bios And there's a serial port configuration for the council cable in the front There's no CPU fan speed sensor not available on here But it does show you the processor and health status and that can be picked up inside a pf sense as well It does have options for the council port redirection settings So the different terminal types vt-100 and see utf-8 I thought that was kind of cool that has some of those features in there So if you wanted to run this all and have it set up so we'll operate from a council That's actually a feature that's built in Now the one thing I am going to change in here you go under chipset Restore AC after power loss We want to have it at last state that way if it comes on now It did turn on automatically as soon as I plug the power in but I like to make sure that this is set just in case There's a it's installed somewhere and we generally want the firewalls to boot up after power loss So we'll go save an exit and go ahead and load So I have the units all set up and installed and I wanted to make a note here if you'd noticed in the review the Amazon page shows LAN 6 5 4 3 2 1 but the actual labels on this are Like this here as shown at the bottom They're actually labeled with the same way pf sense labels them which is really convenient So when you're adding them you don't have to know which one of the six you're adding they go in the same order Of course, you can always rename those but at least they're labeled there. So The beep works the little speaker in there plays a little tune when pf sense boots up Which is nice because you're really you're not leaving a monitor plugged into these So that was a pleasant surprise to hear it play its little song boot time is about I timed it Consistently be a roughly a hundred and twenty-five seconds of boot time not too bad So about two minutes to boot up from the time you hit the button or even a hot reboot No problems there that seems reasonably fast with the SSD So now no issues now It it does have the full support for here's all the hardware crypto the AES and I and all the different function support which I have enabled which you go to advanced miscellaneous and Go ahead and turn it on if I buy it out of the box It's not picked up in here So I set that on because I set up two of these units So here's the first one here's the second one and their VPN to each other So I have open VPN and I have these each going to each other's I wanted to test the VPN thorough foot speed So I have this pulled up and I have the two Two computers my computer that I'm recording on and my laptop is on the other network and I have this set up so I can Across the VPN test the speed connections So you can already see I've done a couple tests already making sure it worked and we'll run another test here Now as you can see I'm running a test. It's pretty consistent And I'm going to show you the CPU load over here. So you see the outputs there, which we got about 339 I'm seeing about the same if you've seen the last test was about 336 and you can watch open VPN We're gonna watch on this side. This is a system load So the system load is going up to about 28% running European 38% while it's running 46 So the open VPN is taxing the processor To get the transfer rates. I'm assuming it's just a dedicating two CPUs because I'm only seeing That much processor usage on it, but you know pretty consistent 331 339 It's it varies just a little bit in there. I'm not sure what causes the slight jitter, but works really well That's pretty fast. I mean most of your internet connections, especially here in the US Peek out around a hundred until you get into the commercial Side where you get fiber and even faster, but so you can transfer faster than your internet now Now what we're really gonna talk about though is the limitations of being a seller on I have suricata loaded. I'm gonna show you what the transfer speed is once you get suricata loaded now I've already tested these firewalls and no need to repeat the test here Going through the firewall full gigabit speed it transfers at the full speed of the neck Seller on his hat is fast enough with these Intel Nick cards to handle that. That's not really an issue So let's go over here. We're gonna go with services Suricata I already got it configured and set up if you're not sure how to do that I got a video on it and I have all the rules enabled so it's got a lot to do So I just went enabled all the rules when I did this And you see just as soon as you enable suricata just the processing it is gonna peak the processor for a second just starting up the service So it's definitely intensive and that's where Having a faster processor for your pfSense with a lot of memory Can come in handy and the slower the processor on these the more issues you're gonna have with trying to run a Intrusion Texan because inspecting all the packets does take its toll on the processor so over here Give it a second to finish starting up suricata and loading the rule sets It also causes when you turn on suricata it causes the VPN to stop working and Then it slowly cancels it out renews research to service And after a few minutes the VPN will log back in we can force it by restarting the VPN on the other side Yep. All right. Now it's back up and running It'll reconnect on a timer automatically and a processor usage has all gone back down suricata is basically idling right now With just a little bit of traffic. It's watching going through here. So let's do our speed test again So we'll pull the speed test over here So now it slowed down till we're getting to 65. So if you look up to the previous speed test We are here at 331 mags And now we're down to 35 so the suricata does take that let's watch what we do here. Let me actually make the font a little bigger So we see open VPN and suricata running So we run the test you'll watch both of these peek out and they're competing for CPU time Which is what's causing the slowdown. So this is where the cell around but still not bad I mean it says cell around is a little bit weaker So it's not going to handle this at full speed and of course if you have really heavy packet transfers You may have a problem On this if you're trying to run suricata VPNs and everything but that depends on speed of your internet connection Obviously, this is gigabit because these are directly connected across the network to each other But you can see that even with that. We're we're still seeing 265 mags over the VPN It's still able to transfer, you know really fast over the local network So it's only the combination of VPN and suricata that we see it slow down a little bit But still very reasonable for the price I mean you're not talking about a super expensive over a thousand dollar firewall here It's almost something reasonably priced that's able to perform this well of VPN and have six gigabit network ports So my overall impression of this is I'm really happy with it It works really well and hasn't really you know been using for a couple days Hasn't really caused any issues the low wattage uses is really nice too The fact that this is only you know eight watts and we run peak things like running suricata on there and the VPN when it Comes to a full load. It's hitting 11 watts, which is Pretty nice the power adapter the power brick that comes with it is a 40 watt adapter and stays very cool Even after running for a couple days It hasn't had any issues like it's not I always worry about if they get too warm with the longevity of them And because this is completely passively cooled with the heat sink. It's it's not really been a big deal I'm not worried about the thermal temperature on it So my overall impression is pretty good with these protect teleboxes They seem to work pretty good. I've used their boxes in the past Unfortunately, the older ones don't have the AES and I support but this one does this is the seller on model reviewed I believe they have an Intel one coming out as well I don't see it listed yet on their Amazon, but not a bad box for the price I mean 299 is not cheap, but you're getting a really solid Metal passively cooled box for 299 that you have to add just a hard drive and some RAM too Which really isn't that expensive? So for under $400 you can build a box if you got to get a deal on the RAM so right around that price anyways So I'll leave the link on Amazon where you can buy these if you like the content here like and subscribe. Appreciate it