 Tom here for long systems and you can't talk about getting started with a pf sense without talking about what you're going to run pf sense on and with the release of 2301 pf sense plus here in February of 2023 and I believe these soon to be released pf sense 2.7 I've been playing with the development builds of that I'm gonna be doing some new videos on getting started with pf sense But I wanted to make this video as a reference to answer this question that comes up anytime People start talking about I want to start with pf sense of what should I be running it on? Obviously if you have hardware laying around that's awesome. You can run it on that it runs on a lot of great x86 hardware Please use Intel network cards Please quit trying to use real tech and complaining about all the problems that come with real tech if you have and you can find These used on eBay relatively cheap. You can get Intel network cards relatively cheap That's just end of story on that when it comes to support for network cards The BSD based operating system works best with those everything else is kind of meh I wouldn't recommend it but getting back to the topic of what about the neckate hardware versus the Insert name of some of the quote Tom top tin Yanling Minces protectly like I have right here What about those compared to the neckate hardware and why does Tom keep recommending neckate hardware? So because he sponsored no, I'm not sponsored by neckate at all I have no financial affiliation with them. We just like pf sense a lot and we deploy it a lot in businesses We do a lot of consulting as part of network integrations when we're replacing IT infrastructure and neckate and the pf sense product is something we use a lot in that Rebuild of people's networks and consulting and integrations now We also use this for the customers that we directly support not just the consulting work We do so overall we've installed a lot of these devices and yes, we have bought Some of these protectly and co-tom and other boxes as well So I want to give my experience I've had with these and share some of the details about how they work Now I want to start with why we choose neckate hardware And there's a few reasons here and one of the first ones that may not be obvious to everyone But that's how pf sense gets funded as well Neckate takes the money from hardware and yes pays developers including ones who contribute upstream to BSD and other Related open source projects and that's how the funding works Because you're contributing code to the greater good of the open source ecosystem and give me a way that doesn't put you in Some magical position where someone else just takes care of all of your expenses and needs and pays your bills for you People have to have a job where the money comes from and that's the mechanism by which pf sense funded is via neckate So I want to make sure that's pretty clear in case it wasn't but it is an important little aspect of it Now next some of the really strong business you cases of why you do it And that's really simple pf sense being that neckate funds it neckate also takes the time to design Their hardware guaranteed to work with pf sense current version and future versions because that's where the testing is going to occur They also take the time to benchmark the devices and they post the details of those benchmarks And this is really important when you are choosing a firewall for a business They may have a certain spec they need to meet or they may have a number of VPN users any speed They need to meet with those having the raw routing speeds the iMix routing speeds the VPN routing speeds both raw and iMix So you can kind of gauge the traffic that you have and see if there's a box that matches the profile That's really important and having the support from neckate on that because you want a predictable Outcome is great. And when you buy their hardware, they don't just say it works with pf sense They guarantee it works with all the different scenarios you may throw pf sense at so it's not just about booting it up and saying Yeah, I route some traffic. They will route at the speeds They posted on their site because they took the time to test and benchmark them now Let's talk about the other devices such as this Quotam and specifically from this Amazon listing Quotam best router You 750 g5 Intel Selleron and you can see I purchased three of these last one was about August 30th This is currently the one I'm running at home and I'll offer my opinion on it works quite well I haven't had any problems with it I wanted to do some testing at home and well, I swapped firewalls back and forth I actually only recently put this in at home. It was in our lab at work So yeah, we kind of move these around and we like to test different things because we know a lot of you the audience wants To know about them and who's better to test it than people who will do Complicated configs and see how they hold up such as having a privacy VPN routing a bunch of traffic in an AJ Proxy setup and top P&G Zabix wire guard tail scale Got all the different things running on this and I've also switched this over the PF sense plus So it is current running the latest current 23.01. This has the two and a half gig Intel Network cards on there and my overall feelings are this thing works great now That sounds like a glowing recommendation But let's now get a little bit more detailed because some people just wanted to have the question answered Will it work with PF sense? Did you do a lot of testing with it? Yeah, brief testing Let's go back over to why we have a couple dead devices in front of me We didn't buy that many of these particular protective devices these particular ones also are from 2018 and they're out of warranty obviously, but they kind of just died on me We actually had a few of them die I posted on Twitter and that conversation kind of well got bigger on Twitter of people talking about their Experiences well was kind of similar as mine. We have bought Substantially more neckate hardware than we have any quotoms or any of these other devices Matter of fact the protective devices are a little bit different than some of the other ones I mentioned because they actually have a nicer website and they seem to have some bios updates But that quote on the one I'm using for example, there is a new bios update There's not even as much as a read me as to what is Contained in the new bios update and you know to reduce suspicions I did upload the bios and a few other files from their site over to virus totals didn't find any Thing in there, but nonetheless, it's kind of weird when there's no read me into just a new version and no clear Reason whether or not I should load that new version or what fixes or changes to suspect on that And that's where these devices kind of fall flat now I get it for home users and especially home users that are in the European markets and some of the other markets That are outside the US I know prices can be substantially higher a neckate and that coat on box with only a $201 price tag here in the US That's a pretty tempting price for a firewall by the way I didn't link it down below if you want to buy one off Amazon because hey That's an affiliate link. I do have and I get it That's like I said it may fit your budget as a home user, but if you're a business I just can't really recommend these and we don't deploy these anymore to business scenarios Where we need absolute reliability predictability and all the other reasons I said that makes me choose the neckate hardware now. I don't exactly know why these failed I did take a closer look at the board to see if there's something obvious But I don't have these skills or the tools that Lewis Rossman does to do a real deep dive in a board level diagnostic on these But the failure modes we experience are some of these the lights come on Some of them they fail and the lights don't come on and yes, of course, we tried other power supplies hard drives memory There's not even Anything to give me even a clue as to why they're no longer working if they just worked until they didn't without any Warning signs and that may be fine for a home user It's annoying as a home user if you suddenly don't have internet Maybe it does disrupt your work if you work from home, but for a business and building these into a reliability of Infrastructure for IT. I don't really trust them enough to do that So that's kind of my opinion I wanted to leave you with here from my experience of using all these different variety of boxes And we're gonna continue testing and you know using one at my studio here where if it goes out I'm gonna go down the street to my office and we'll have another box They have on the shelf or later on I'll probably swap this out to a neck gate Another one of my employees will take this one home or whatever change up we do no big deal for a business and that Disruption where you have to go out there and schedule time to do it. I don't feel it's really worth the risk We always want to support PF sense We want to support neck gate and we want to use those devices and we even keep spare neck gates at the office to Make sure we have one in case something does happen to a client so we can properly support them And it's really easy when you are swapping from the same device if there's a failure where I grabbed that last config loaded on the same model device There's no monkeying around. I know I can get that customer up quickly These aren't the most consistent matter of fact something I thought was interesting As these were ordered relatively close together, but there are slight differences in them They both have four ports. They both have the same intel chipset But there's slight differences such as not even having the rj45 serial adapter on one of them But nonetheless, like I said, I just wanted to throw my opinion out there and have this video as a reply when people ask me What should I get or why do you keep suggesting neck gates? So often are they sponsored by them? Which i'm not But this is my reasoning as to why ultimately decision is yours to make I just want to throw this out there. Leave your thoughts and comments down below and thank you