Summary of my experience with Firewalla Gold.
I’ve had my Firewalla Gold for over 5 months now and I will simply say that I am in love with it. It has improved my home network’s security significantly and it has done so without negatively impacting the user experience of my family and friends on my home network. Firewalla Gold was very simple to setup and has been easy to maintain and monitor my network’s security from their mobile app. This firewall appliance is most certainly a prosumer device; it has the feature set you’d expect on professional firewall equipment, but the ease of management and use for the consumer market.
Table of Contents
Speed & Availability
Firewalla Gold provides owners advanced insights into their network. It is very easy to see live throughput for WAN connections as well as which devices are utilizing the most bandwidth. Firewalla Gold supports Multi-WAN. My home configuration uses a link-aggregated connection to my broadband modem since I am able to get speeds over 1G for my primary connection and I have a tethered connection to an iPhone as a backup connection using the Firewalla WiFi SD antenna. Firewalla now has a Gold Plus with 2.5G ports, but when I purchased mine, the 2.5G Plus model wasn’t available.
Improved Network Security
Improving my home network’s security was at the forefront of why I wanted a home firewall, and ultimately why I chose Firewalla Gold. Firewalla Gold has robust intrusion prevention, network segmentation and active protect rules. They even support Advanced GEO-IP Filtering to block all traffic from specific countries from your network. On a typical day, 15-20% of all traffic bound for my network is blocked by Firewalla.
Firewalla makes it very easy to get more details on the source IP trying to reach your network. Here is an example from a device in China attempting to Telnet into my network. I happen to have all traffic to and from China blocked except for very few explicitly permitted IP addresses.
Parental Controls
I have kids at home, so parental controls was an important feature to me. Not only can I see all network flows from any device on my network and a historical log, but I am able to block things like porn from my network, and limit things like social media to only certain devices at certain times. If any devices on my network violate rules I’ve set, I get immediate notifications on my phone so I can see what is going on. Firewalla lets you create device groups where you can create specific rules based on groups making it easier to manage policies across your devices. If your house is like mine, you have well over 50 devices online at any point in time. Not being able to group devices to manage policies could make the process very tedious, but Firewalla did a great job with this.
VPN
Firewalla Gold VPN client can use many third-party VPN services. You can then connect your whole network through a third-party VPN or you can connect single devices to the VPN. What is really cool, is that you can create rules to route only specific traffic from specific devices over VPN.
Firewalla Gold also serves as a VPN server. I happen to like this a lot. When I’m not at home, I use WireGuard VPN to connect my mobile devices back to my house to take advantage of my network’s security and other features like my own DNS server, PI-Hole, etc. This gives me extra protection when I’m away from my home, and gives me a consistent network experience outside of my home.
Unbound DNS
In one of Firewalla’s recent releases they incorporated Unbound DNS. I happened to already use Unbound DNS on a server in my house, so I don’t use it specifically on Firewalla, but it is a notable mention here for those that don’t have, or don’t want their own DNS Server. I’ll write a future blog post on the value of hosting your own DNS server vs using DNS from your ISP or similar as this is a very important topic.
Wrap up
If Firewalla Gold is a device that is interesting to you, go ahead and check out their website: https://firewalla.com/
I am not sponsored or affiliated with Firewalla in any way. I’m just a happy user of their product.
If you have any feedback for me, or want to discuss anything, please reach out to me on my contact page.
Cheers!