Protectli FW4A experiences

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timofeym

New Member
Jun 11, 2018
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Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
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They look interesting. Maybe we can get Rohit to review one.
 

RedneckBob

New Member
Dec 5, 2016
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Protectli is supposed to be the alternative to the super cheap Chinese firewall boxes. Supposedly they don't have keyloggers pre-installed like the cheaper Alibaba and Amazon firewalls.

They're fanless https://www.amazon.com/Firewall-Appliance-Gigabit-AES-NI-Barebone/dp/B072ZTCNLK/ and way under $300.

Is anyone here using them? I want an x86 pfSense that's fanless. Here's the product page FW4A – 4 Port Intel ® E3845 – Protectli
I bought one of the FW4A models, but when it arrived and I started to plug it into my home network I got an uneasy feeling about it. Not sure why...maybe it's that I can't get the BIOS from anyone but Protectli and you cannot find much information about them on-line. Maybe the reason is I can't find a security audit of one of these boxes. Given there are an absurd amount of them for incredibly cheap has me believing its too good to be true.

These Qotom folks have similar boxes and they are even cheaper. They will even install PFsense for you. LOL.

I dunno....I want to order a couple of these, setup an isolated network with netshark, and power them up and see what flies out over the network.


Buy Products Online from China Wholesalers at Aliexpress.com
 

Evan

Well-Known Member
Jan 6, 2016
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I wouldn’t be trusting and preinstalled pfsense. Hardware / firmware probably ok.

Just putting them on a watched network won’t help to tell completely if they are safe, have to probe the network for anything listening and waiting to act in creative ways
 

Occamsrazor

Member
Feb 23, 2018
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I don't really see the advantage of Protectli over Qotom. I bought a Qotom Q355g4 with i5 processor, 8gb RAM and 60GB SSD just over a year ago for $300. Installed pfSense fresh so no need to worry about spyware etc though I don't know much about BIOS. Very much overkill for my setup. I only have a 50mb internet connection but running full pfBlocker, Suricata IDS on both WAN and LAN, and a bunch of other stuff at full speed it only uses around 10-15% CPU. Has been flawless since I got it around a year ago.