"Like all products I purchase, especially higher priced items, I tend to do a little research. Having been using the pfSense community edition for years, I wanted to move to a Netgate branded appliance, and only "assumed" this would be the right move.

I contacted their sales department to start the process of questions, even left a question on the Amazon page - the main question being, "Can I import my existing backup into the new device so I don't have to start from scratch, EVEN THOUGH I WAS USING A DEVEL VERSION?" "Of course" they said, "no problem". Well it turns out it "was" a problem and that was the beginning of my dealings with Netgate. The import didn't work and I had to go two months back to a non devel version to even start the process of restore to the new device. I was on the devel version in the first place because they broke NAT forwarding, and my OpenVPN servers stop functioning.

After multiple attempts at a restore, with no connectivity, along with having to reload the firmware not once, but 4 times, I finally had a tech login remotely and notice that the vLANS on the interfaces were named wrong. This is over 24 hours later. See, I would send them my backups and they would "convert" and send back. So, finally once the tech manually edited the backup file, I restored once again, and magically everything started to connect.

Now - I am a pro-privacy kinda person, so I have 5 PIA VPNs running, all in gateway groups for top speed. Oh wow, this is not the box to use for even 1 let alone 5 simultaneous VPNs. On an Intel i3 NUC and GB FIOS connection, I normally would see speeds of about 500-800 Mbps up and down, yes over the VPN, using only the 1 NIC port (VLANS). With this thing, I saw 40-60 Mbps, and that was only with 1 VPN session going. I swore something was wrong, and once again contacted support and this time even gave them admin access to my box (via a Firewall rule and new account).

I received a bunch of ideas they thought would fix the problem, like changing DNS settings, etc, but I knew all along it was the crappy cell phone ARM CPU.

Okay, no problem, I grabbed an older i7, bought a $70 dual NIC, installed pfSense CE, and restored my last backup (this time fixing the interfaces manually) and I was once again off to the races.

No problem, I will just return the device and get a full refund. Not so fast. Yes it is true, believe it or not. They have a GARBAGE return policy that if you return the device, no matter what condition and even if it is next day, they will charge you a 25% restocking fee. So on top of $27 to ship to me two day shipping, the $20 to ship the POS product back, and the $110 plus tax I had to eat, I am out almost $200 for a POS product that I will never see again. And I am certain, they will sell that product at full value.

Now you tell me, as a consumer... Is that fair? Would you take the chance? I hope not.

Take your business elsewhere.

"

"I purchased a PFSense firewall appliance from Netgate that had a complete failure recently. Just 4 months past the warranty expiration.

This caused my entire network to be down. The management was frozen and the IP addresses dead. All the lights were on.

As it turned out, the hard disk (60GB SSD) was full.

So, bug number 1, their software does not auto clean up log files when the disk gets full in order to keep the appliance running and prevent downtime. The VGA console show no messages to indicate this problem.

So, I figured I would factory reset which specifically says "All packages will be removed".

But number 2, the factory reset did not clear out the disk space taken by the package, and it still was full.

So I called.

They said after the warranty expires, I could not download the original firmware so I could erase the disk and install clean. (Or upgrade to a bigger disk while I was at it).

I complained, and they made an exception this time.

Be forewarned..

In this case there was nothing I could do but to buy another year of warranty, or call and beg to get the software. There was no included OS CD/USB drive and the download is obscured by a paywalled website.

Their "other" advice was to use the community edition freely available and live without the optimized network drivers and hardware IPSEC encryption of the hardware appliance.

Nice option.

The part that makes NO sense, is their software tweaks are specific to their hardware, AND will update to any version even after the warranty expires (tested it on another one that did not die but was past the 1 year warranty).

So, WHY do they not allow the general public to download the appliance specific one at ANY time?

Get your own hardware, use the community edition, or the alternative, OpenSense (a fork of pfSense) which seems to have better development.

"

"I purchased a PC Engines WRAP embedded computer, with a case and power supply. Netgate shipped it promptly, and it arrived with no problems."