Help us make the Firewalla Gold 10Gbit Unit
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We will broadcast the final pricing the week before 4/2/2024 launch. Currently, the team is still debating on whether we should be making these units in Taiwan; that should get settled this week. If there are enough signups, we may be able to push the price lower than $850 (even lower with the coupon).
The made-in-Taiwan part is to lower import taxes ...
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I think the specs were set before this thread was created. There have been just as many (if not more) requests for SFP+ as RJ45.
I think the lack of SFP+ hurts its credibility as anything other than a home/hobby device. Of course it is better than that, but I think it is hard to take seriously with the current specs.
I know this may sound silly/trivial, but the colors scream crayons to me. Not what I would expect in a professional business type device.
The lack of log retention and retrieval is another big issue.
I really love my FWG+. I hope this new one is successful, but I hope they come out with an improved one targeting a more serious audience.
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@jarocks, at the moment, we are not interested in building virtual or software-only instances of the firewalla. Although it is fully possible to do so, it will be a nightmare to support different platforms of variable quality standards. I assume most of you will want us to focus on building features to secure and make your network easier and not on debugging hardware we never tested our software with.
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@Robert, I agree with you. The colors for this high-performance box should be corporate. Who will use a 10Gbps performance device at home? If you are going to make this high-performance device, it should have more corporate colors and port numbers. If you are considering it for home, I think other small boxes were sufficient. There is no need for this new box. Also, the performance values are still not convincing to me. It is necessary to prove that this 10Gbps performance is achieved when the firewall rules are active and the application filter is turned on.
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How long is the fan expected to work when located in a garage which has dust and grime. My Gold+ is sealed. The 10Gbps fan design gives me pause since we all know that dust and grime will sooner or later accumulate and probably require periodic opening and cleaning of the 10Gbps unit. Is this your expectation too, and what is being done to ameliorate the issue? Will an Alert be generated when the fan is no longer working and will the unit continue to work at a reduced CPU rate within whatever the temperature allows? Will the unit shut down at a certain temperature? And can we clean and service the fan?
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The fan used is a variable speed fan, I remember the life span of this fan is 10 to 20 years at 25C. (the fan is standard and can easily be replaced) if you don't have high throughput, I don't think the fan will run (or run at high speed) all the time, there is software that will control this.
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I really don't mind the colours, as long as it works it can be sh*ty brown with purple spots on it. But seriously guys we're in 2024, please make a modular design out of it and at leaast give us the option for a SFP+ port at a premium. I'd bet you'd have a lot more pre-orders for the SFP+ version than for the simple one !
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I share @Mark9 concerns about having a fan. Living in a dusty environment (lower floor in a major US city), I had every single fan in various pieces of electronics - monitors, laptops, etc. get noisy or fail over time. Not to mention air purifier fans that run 24/7, I had different brands fail multiple times within a year. They also say that their fans are rated for decades, possibly based on failure testing done in clean room environment, because in reality they don’t last that long. At this point I am so tired of servicing fans, dealing with warranty claims, and sending devices for repairs that I absolutely do not want to add yet another piece of electronics with a fan. I love my Gold and was really excited about the Pro but having a fan is a dealbreaker for me. Maybe you could look into thermal management optimization and fanless design in the next iteration…
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Thank you @Firewalla for responding. I totally understand the challenge. Have you guys seen passive solutions like Noctua NH-P1? It handles loads up to 100W well (e.g. see Anandtech review) and there are Reddit posts like “Noctua's NH-P1 Passive CPU Cooler + Intel's i9-13900K : Over 15 minutes of 125W Cinebench before hitting TJmax!”.
I would assume that DPI does not come close to requiring a full-blown 13900K@125W so a solution like NH-P1 is possible, at least in theory. Size-wise, you probably don’t need a massive beast like that to achieve efficient heat dissipation. So *maybe* it is possible to engineer a custom solution like NH-P1 that only marginally increases the size of the unit? Your R&D costs might be offset by cost savings from not having to service units with fan failures in the long run.
Noctua markets their solution as “no noise, less dust, 100% fail-proof”, something that the customers and your own repair team would surely appreciate! -
It would be easy to just bring in fan speed and CPU temperature and have alarms if there is a problem. Notifications straight to your phone will give you the fastest response to an issue. If they go with high quality fan it will last years. To me, temperature coming into the app will be very handy. In rack mounts with servers and other hot equipment, it would be handy if there was some kind of temperature graph or highest plus average temp per day. Most intel CPUs have temperature sensors.
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I don’t think the unit would be very popular with passive cooling. I’m very happy to see active cooling.
My FWG+ is in its rack mount in the top of an open-frame rack. I ended up mounting a PC fan under the top rack lid, because temps got warmer than I liked. It stays nice and cool now.
With six actively cooled managed switches in the rack (in addition to other appliances), the new Firewalla will fit right in. Except for color. 😁
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Robert, I disagree and am curious what makes you think that the unit would not be popular with passive cooling if it keeps temperatures within operating bounds? By that logic, current fanless Firewalla products should not be very popular. And people would prefer active cooling in the current units to make them run cooler. There’s little benefit to that but more of potential headache. You want to spend your time on dealing with fans? Great, it might be your idiosyncratic preference like a personal choice to smoke or not to buckle up, but I would not generalize it to others. Do you have actual data to back it up?
Not trying to be snarky; I also don’t like when the units get too hot and the effect in the electronics lifespan. But I like it even less when I have to deal with broken/noisy/dusty fans which also can lead to overheating.
Everything else equal, fewer points of failure means a more reliable product. Less maintenance. Less time wasted on unnecessary work. A rational person would not prefer a less reliable product over a more reliable one. With that in mind, it is too bad the team did not try designing a custom passive cooling solution. -
There’s absolutely no way this unit can function with passive cooling without the entire chassis becoming one big heatsink and a significant amount of R&D into airflow and heat dispersion. The RJ45 ports are going to get *HOT*, which is why people use SFP+ ports and fiber for higher bandwidth speeds. My 10Gb RJ45 SFP+ modules are almost burning hot in my other switches, to the point where they have to be port-staggered due to radiating heat. And given that this CPU is an IDS and not just some ASIC on a standard switch, who knows what additional heat req’s there are.
Completely agree on the fan being a point of failure and likely a big annoyance. But a passive solution isn’t in the cards on the current timeline, business realities and possibly even the capabilities of the team/manufacturer to design/research. Perhaps there’s a way to introduce a mesh filter on the intake to reduce the dust going into the system, dunno. Best we can hope for is Firewalla actually stocks the fans used (or at least shares information on suitable replacements) as accessories making it super easy to replace when they inevitably fail.
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The heat is mainly from the CPU, not the ethernet side. I do know if the unit is less active, passive cooling may be possible since the fan is software controlled.
If you are running 10gigabit, then likely the fan will spin, but unlikely at full speed. (table top configuration)
If you stuff this thing between two very hot things inside of a rack, the fan may spin more, I assume this is not an issue.
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