Zotac ZBOX CI - Reviews

(4.6)

5 reviews

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17.1.2018

As stated above I REALLY like this box and it's low voltage, no fan design. It's literally silent with only a small LED that goes green when on and red when off. My DDR3 Laptop Ram (2x 4Gb DDR3 Laptop SoDIMMs) and 2.5" SSD drive both fitted in perfectly and it instantly sprung to life letting me boot in to the BIOS/UEFI. The BIOS is basic in options but gives you enough to do most things you need like boot orders, VTx-d, etc. Installing an OS from a USB was relatively painless in general. Whilst I didn't run it on my own box, I'm pretty sure this would nicely boot Windows 10 or Ubuntu and run at pretty good speeds for basic desktop usage (Word processing, e-mails, netflix, youtube, etc).I've had it on now for several months and it doesn't really get that hot either, just sits there, doing it's thing.My usage was primarily as a firewall/router, hence where the dual NICs attracted me. I have a 300/20mb connection so my throughput needed to reach that speed but I also wanted IPS which isolates the number of "Off the shelf" router/firewall combos to stupidly expensive, a bit of a bodge or just not fast enough.So here's what I tried...UPDATE - PFSense and OPNSense now work out of the Box and very efficiently!PFSense (old version)- Realtek NICs need drivers added for the corresponding FreeBSD version and throughput just wouldn't hit above 50mb throughput - I'm 99% positive this is Realtek NIC driver related (the opinions of Realtek NICs in PFSense forums makes me think better support is way, way down on the list of things to do if possible at all). Also, compatibility with the SD Reader means you have to tweak boot settings to ignore it (and a never ending boot loop). Ultimately I spent half a day on it and gave up.OPNSense (old version) - Realtek NICs drivers are baked in the base build but throughput was similar to PFSense - I'm fairly positive this is Realtek NIC drivers again and tweaking some of the hardware offload settings just caused the connection to go so unstable it may have well just locked me out (to be fair it warns this might happen). Compatibility with the SD Reader was also still an issue I had to tweak. I spent several hours on it and gave up though the inclusion of Realtek drivers at least showed willing.Sophos UTM - I tested this previously on another box with Realtek USB NICs and it was surprisingly stable but I understand it's based on a Linux fork that's far more accommodating. I have no doubt this would work but the 50 IP limit does not work in a smart home environment so I didn't try.IPFire - Realtek NICs drivers are baked in the base build and it's a Linux based fork that seems happier with the hardware in here. Throughput maxed out my connection even with an IPS installed and running. It's smooth, stable and the core seems to get updated regularly. Now the downsides, it seems the Linux kernel might be ?old? so support for the CPU seems to go back to a single core or something on boot up and shutdown... either way, boot up is slowwwww (15 mins or so). Also you need to tweak it a bit to get things like auto IPS updates to work which isn't ideal.VMWare 6 (an alternative approach) - Realtek NICs need drivers adding by building a custom ESXI ISO/installer and I think I also added some drivers for the SD Reader. Unit booted and installed ok, management interface was there and all functioned as expected. Loaded PFSense as a VM... wouldn't hit above 50mb throughput - Unsure here if this is the drivers loaded in to ESXI or latency/overheads of running through VM (I suspect the drivers). I also loaded IPFire as a VM and this now booted MUCH quicker but the network throughput dropped to be comparable to PFSense. Spent a few hours on this and gave up.So my suggestion if your trying to create a firewall/router with IPS and good throughput is either IPFire or Sophos UTM on this hardware. Both of these are pretty good (Sophos has the edge on the nice UI and IPS update features, but IPFire is no nonsense and fully open to more than 50 IPs if you can live with the boot times). Seeing as my original plan was to run PFSense, I'd love to learn if anyone else has better experiences than me and gets it working at acceptable speeds just so I can have a play.