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This may have been covered elsewhere, but nothing recent was found.
For a year I have been running the Free Sophos UTM 9 at home. I had some problems with my hardware, and I need to reload the firewall. The Sophos Free Home web page now lands on the Home Use XG Firewall. But I could not find where it is as feature rich as the Free UTM product.
QUESTIONS: (1) Is the XG limit 4 cores and 6 GB of RAM give more or less throughput over the Free UTM? (2) Does the XG Firewall have the same powerful Deep Packet Inspection engine as the UTM with 10s of thousands of patterns? (3) Does the XG Firewall have the Country Blocking by region or country with the separate inbound/outbound settings & exceptions?
UTM hardware are (for lack of a more detailed explanation) a computer with 2 or more NICs in a 1-2 u chassis.
If you have spare hardware, are build your own (in whatever form factor you want), you run the Sophos XG OS (FS-OS) for free (home use only) https://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools/sophos-xg-firewall-home-edition.aspx
I would like to buy a hardware UTM for home use (up to 5 devices). I appreciate this product maybe overkill for my scenario as this type of product appears to be aimed for business/higher device networks however I want to experiment and learn more about this device/system. For this reason, it is not justified to spend a large amount of money on a device I don’t actually need, I just want to learn about it (I simply learn better getting my “hands dirty” if you will).
My research has not found definitive information that the solution I want is actually available. Here is what I believe to be true so far;
UTM’s being aimed at business users are monitized with a initial cost to buy the hardware and then charging a licence fee for additional/useful features in a business envionment for an ongoing fee - licence fee.UTM’s can be either hardware or software based depending on the provider -UTM’s can be purchased via resellers on e-commerce sites such as E-bay however it is not always clear if the sale cost of these models is a one-off/flat cost or if you would still need to purchase/renew a licence with the provider for it to work?
My best soloution so far; Sophos offer a free UTM which appears to be well suited for my basic needs of experimentation. Now this is a software based UTM and needs to be installed on a dedicated computer or a VM. The VM option is good to start with so I can learn about the configuration options etc however I want as much data caputred from my home network as possible therefore want the UTM monitoring the network all day every day. I prefer not to leave a PC/VM running on power all day due to cost and physical space limitations. I would like to run the UTM from a dedicated hardware applicance made specifically for this purpose - these are small, convenient, lower power consumption than using my spare PC.
Coming back to my question;
Assuming most/all dedicated hardware UTM applicances require an ongoing fee, then I guess my soloution would be to have the ability to install a free software based UTM (e.g Sophos free home UTM) on a hardware UTM applicance (either recipricol to the software provider so Sophos in this case or from any manufacturer subject to meeting the minimum system requirements of the software) purchased from a reseller (e.g. Ebay).
If this option is feasable then I would achieve my goal of;
having a dedicated UTM hardware applicancepaid money as a “one-off” cost in this case for the hardware only with no further/ongoing/licence fees
For further clairty, I would like to provide an analogy of what I’d like to do; I can buy a PC from a reseller site like Ebay for a one-off cost. I can then keep the existing Operating system of Windows if it remains free alternatively I can install a different OS (that meets the system spec) which maybe a free version of Linux. The PC is too large, inconvenient, power hungry for what it is to be used for, so instead I buy a small device such as a laptop.
@Sophos
Hello. I am interested in Sophos for home use and I have some questions.
Can the home edition use more than 2 network interfaces?
Is the home edition limited in what network inteface chips/cards it can use?
Is there a way around the 4 core & 6 gig limitation as I would like to use a more robust system?
What anti-virus engine does it use?
Can one buy a used Sophos appliance and install the Firewall Home edition onto it?
Is the home edition a full blown software solution that would be as powerful as if one were to purchase an appliance that came with the software for business?
Anything else you can tell me would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Been trying to get the Sophos UTM for days but I never get the email from their site for the download link. Do they still offer the UTM for home or are they pushing the XG now?