Protectli Vault clone with i7-10510U - Thoughts, Coreboot support?

[Darkguy]

Hi,

currently looking to build my first OPNsense-based firewall. I was looking at Protectli and saw that there are many basically 1:1 clones available on Aliexpress (Protectli Vaults only seems to be a rebranded Yanling ODM devices themselves).

After some browsing, I found this device, which is a 6-port, passively cooled firewall using a relatively current i7-10510U.


Does anybody use this  and can say anything about the quality? Is this using the same board Protectly uses for their current flagship device with an i7-8550U CPU? Any idea if Coreboot from Protectli will run on this?

Thanks!

[jclendineng]

First off I use a similar product from that vendor. It works great. Second, the cpu you get will NOT be that cpu. You may get similar performance though. They use engineer samples and sometimes not even pre beta samples so if you do a deep dive past the easily editable cpu stats you will probably get some unreleased model. That said if you are on a budget and don’t mind no support and the fact that the cpu may not even be a released sku go for it. I was not able to install coreboot but if the vendor gives the option I would take it. The board and bios are all very custom also unheard of models so I don’t think you can install coreboot without bricking unless vendor offers it from the factory. That said I like mine a lot, it’s sturdy and well built. Get the cheapest you can find of the same cpu since they all come from the same factory pretty much and all use left over or engineer sample parts to get cost to them almost nothing.

[oneplane]

Most of them do not have coreboot from the factory, but since almost all of them are based on the same Intel designs you could probably get it to work anyway. The biggest factor is Intel Boot Guard. If that is enabled, there are some limitations as to how much coreboot you can use.

In general, I tend to use Qotom or Dell VEP boxes, they work pretty well. Someone is selling off a bunch of Xeon D embedded supermicro boards on eBay, also a very nice platform for high performance on the cheap.

On the other hand: what do you actually need? A lot of 1G networks work fine on say, a 4th generation Intel NUC with a miniPCIe network card and an extra hole in the case, or even 2 VLANs on the built in network port for a fully functional 450Mbit network. Costs almost nothing that way and works all the same.