I have reviewed the untangle options and I like that they offer appliances with warranties but noticed the specs on them are a little low. I noticed NextGen makes some nice ones, and then there are custom ones that DIY can make.
What have you found to be the best Untangle Hardware appliance to use for a small office and basic business use and provides a high throughput?
Thank you in advance!
Find an I3 2-4 gB ram 240 GB SSD intel multi-port NIC. Probably overkill is for pf-Sense so should work fine with Untangle.
I talked to Untangle sales and they are very friendly and knowledgeable. I re-reviewed the X series (u50x) and the specs seem adequate for less than 10 users.
Feel free to comment if you have used this or think this is OR is not adequate?
Untangle U50X
Intel Celeron 3215U 1.7 GHz dual core processor
4GB RAM
128GB mSATA SSD
How much headroom does that spec offer for growth?
It has now been 3 months and have been using an Untangle U50x with great success in the small office I posted earlier about. I highly recommend it to others as well. Just an update on this post in case others are debating on it. They opted to use the free apps which fits them best and it has helped greatly with protection vs the old system. Bandwidth with IPS on is great, with a 500 mbps plan they are getting about 490 mbps with almost wire speed and that is with 8-10 persons! Great little device.
I have been running Untangle on a Protectli FW6A for about a month now, and I am very impressed. I love that I can customize the Protectli pretty much anyway I want. Added 8GB of RAM and a 128GB mSATA, and doesn’t even break a sweat with all routing apps turned on. On a residential 1Gbps network I am regularly getting 945Mbps - 987Mbps. Very impressed.
I’m presently looking into a firewall for home use also with a residential 1Gbps network connection. Still trying to decide between pfSence and Untangle, but right now I’m leaning towards the Untangle because it looks easier to use and the reporting.
The FW6A looks like a great solution. Which BIOS did you get with your FW6A… the AMI or the Coreboot (open source) BIOS ???
Since posting this back in May I have since switched to pfSense. So far I am seeing roughly the same bandwidth as with the Untangle, but am enjoying a little more flexibility in configuration. Don’t get me wrong, the Untangle was great, but I didn’t feel like I was using it the way it was intended to be used. I feel a little better running the pfSense, and just simply not loading features that I do not need.
To answer your question it shipped with the AMI BIOS and I haven’t seen any reason to change that out yet.
If you have any further questions I would be more than happy to try and help to the best of my ability.
@tkanger – I using Protectli FW6C with pfsense. Works for me but I was intrigued to setup Untangle. My only problem is that I actually am virtualizing pfsense inside xcp-ng on the device and Untangle doesn’t support virtualization except with I believe VMWare. I wrote them about using xcp-ng(Citrix) and they said it wasn’t supported but might work. The more I looked into it – it might have worked – but with a lot of effort required. I kind of gave up at that point. I’m still curious about Untangle however.
tkanger thanks for your quick reply. Is the FW6A giving you to same good performance using PFSence as you were getting with Untangle ???
I’m assuming that both PFSence and Untangle both require similar hardware specs so the FW6A is a good choice to both firewalls.
Yeah I would say that the results are pretty similar. I really liked the Untangle as a solution that you can plug in and just make it work.
pfSense took a little more handling to get right where I wanted it, but has been MUCH more functional for me on higher functionality features (OpenVPN, VLANing, etc.). For example I attempted to use Untangle to force a single IP to ALWAYS connect to the web using only OpenVPN, but could never get it to work. In pfSense that configuration was much more successful.
But again Untangle works great, has lots of features, and just seems to work right out of the box.
As for the hardware I probably over-sized my hardware because I wanted to get the highest percentage of my 1Gbps internet connection. In my experience the ProtectLi has been great for both and I highly recommend for both software.
Thanks bud I appreciate you help.