Netgate 4200 MAX pfSense+ Security Gateway - Firewall, Router, VPN

Very easy to install, and works as advertised.

The firewall is well made and less complex than the 4100 model I replaced with this unit. I found that it was a bit more complicated than I expected, mostly due to the overall network equipment I have in place and my loss of technical skills because I haven’t had to configure or change equipment for years. Once configured to meet the needs and settings of my other equipment and system, it does a great job.

great product arrived quickly and packaged professionally. installed and up and running with security in minutes.

I purchased this and it did not work. After several emails over a couple of weeks with their tech support, it was decided I should return it and get a new one (which I did). I was charged $118.00 of "restocking fee" even though it did not work and I purchased another one to replace it.

This is the lowest cost Netgate router with an Intel chip that has sufficient power to run the Tailscale software package and its [Tailscale's] inefficient implementation of the wireguard protocol. The less expensive models with ARM processors delivered less that 100kbs for our tests and the 4200 delivered several hundred kbs. We did use Netgate's support with this router on an unrelated matter and it was excellent, as usual. The result is a very useful Router that can fully participate in a Tailscale network; and that combination is very good.

Simple to setup. No problems thus far

"Tac Lite" support doesn't exist. It's, per their support dept. an "alias" for "Community Support" aka "Google it."

I am a seasoned network professional, someone who has installed and used and implemented network equipment from Cisco, Juniper, and TP-link. and Ubiquity. I bought this on the recommendation of someone in r/networking on Reddit. Here's the TLDR version. If you are going to use this simple for its simple routing and logging characteristics, you're going to love this. As long as you're a sophisticated used and know how to configure things, you're going to be fine. The longer version. I have not been able to successfully get ipSEC VPN setup, and the L2TP configuration aspects are just simply non-existent. Setting up ipSEC is insufferably difficult. After spending about four hours with my team, we finally called NetGate support. We were told that, even though you bought this and there's support, the actual support you need will cost somewhere between $399 and $799 for a year of support, because their support is actually "we will help you set an IP address on a LAN and be able to ping it from one of the computers on the subnet". So now, on top of paying my own staff for four hours (a total of about 8 hours of pay) and the amount that I would otherwise have billed, I am going to need to pay an additional amount of money to get the support I need to use it the way that I need (setting up VPN's, etc). So my $619 router now costs several thousands of dollars. So, now, let's talk L2TP. The option to enable L2TP shows, but it doesn't actually doesn't stay on, despite setting up everything the way that the directions stated that it should be., you can go to the LOG , then go back to "L2TP" and it's clicked off. This is the sort of awfulness that I keep experiencing over and over and over. So, we went back to our humble TP-LINK TP605 SafeStream router. that simply works. Sure, we don't have the myriad of options and settings that the Netgate product affors us, and sure, with the tpLink, we don't get the benefit of adding multiple DHCP-enabled subnets to separate LAN ports, we don't get all those really funky and fun options that makes me feel special like king rocket-science-man of the netmask worlds. Sure, the Netgate works for simple applications that don't need VPN and such, but if you don't want to resign yourself to losing tons of time trying to figure out something with awful documentation, and don't have yourself $799 to pay for support (or whatever they're charging for telephone support), then just stick with the TP-LINK stuff, and you'll save yourself the aggravation and the annoyance.

Merci!

returned when I ask a simple support question they wanted to charge me a $300 yearly fee, GUI is outdated