Protectli Vault Pro 4 Port VP2410, Firewall Micro Appliance/Mini PC - Intel Celeron J4125, 8GB DDR4 RAM, 120GB M.2 SSD storage, AES-NI

I am very pleased with my Protectli purchase, just added RAM, using onboard storage and installed pfSense. Well packaged and dispatched from stock at Amazon, my only concern was I could hear some loose inside the unit upon delivery however upon opening it to install my RAM I discovered that both of the M.2 screws were loose and rattling around inside.Yes, you can probably source a generic fanless Intel PC with multiple NICs cheaper however for the slight price premium, quality and peace of mind purchasing from a respected vendor the Protectli is value for money to me.

I’ve used Protectli in the past and have always been impressed with them, build quality, support etc are all very good, so when I needed to replace another, I brought this model as on paper, it ticks all the boxes.I also like to support Protectli (rather than a cheap Chinese box) for their contribution to documentation for *Sense, coreboot etc.This arrived and I setup with opnSense as normal, but when I tried to use the console port with my MacBook, nothing was detected.After quite a while of searching, I found the smoking gun - the Fintek USB chipset used in the Vault isn’t supported on Mac!This crucial fact was buried away as the last line on a KB article on the Protectli site - nothing on Amazon nor the product pages etc.I understand that RS232 serial ports are less common these days so understand the reason for removing it, but to replace it with a solution that doesnt have support on an not insignificant body of users is baffling, especially when there are tried and tested USB chips that work on everything, such as FTDI & CP10xxAnother option could be dual RS232 / USB console, like Cisco have used for a few years…Sadly I’m returning this as console access is something I need & use, and having a dedicated laptop (or virtual machine) just to access this isn’t the answer :(