About N100Firewall
N100Firewall covers fanless Intel N100 firewall appliances end to end: choosing the hardware and the i226-V 2.5GbE controller, installing OPNsense or pfSense on it, comparing the N100 against the N305 and N5105, and diagnosing the faults this class of box actually produces.
It is for people sizing a small router appliance and trying to work out which listing on a marketplace is worth buying, and for people who already own one and need it to behave. Throughput, power and thermal figures come from vendor specifications, driver manual pages and published sizing guidance, each named and linked on the page.
What is covered here
- Comparisons
- Hardware
- Setup
- Troubleshooting
Where to start
- Build guide — what to look for in a listing before buying.
- Setup guide — installing OPNsense and getting the first boot right.
- CPU comparison — N100 against the N305, N5105, N200 and N150.
- Link-drop checklist — a 2.5GbE port that will not stay up.
- Throughput and power estimator — a planning model, not a benchmark.
9 articles are published so far. New articles are announced on the RSS feed; there is no fixed publishing schedule and this site does not promise one.
How these articles are produced
Articles are researched from primary sources: vendor and project documentation, published standards and specifications, release notes, advisories, and measurements published by the people who took them. Drafts are produced with AI assistance and then edited against those same sources before anything is published. Where a figure comes from a datasheet or a third-party measurement, the article names the source and links to it so you can check the original rather than take this site's summary of it.
Everything here is published under the N100Firewall Editorial byline. That is an editorial desk, not a person, and no article on this site claims hands-on lab testing, benchmarking, or first-hand measurement. Nothing here should be read as a report of something this site physically tested.
Corrections
Getting it right matters more than getting it first. If something on this site is wrong, out of date, or missing the source it should cite, email hello@n100firewall.com with the page and the specific claim. Substantive corrections are made on the page itself rather than quietly dropped.
How this site is funded
This site currently runs no affiliate links, no sponsored content, no paid placement, and no display advertising. Nothing on it earns a commission. If that changes, this page and the disclosure page will say so before any such link appears.
The full position is on the disclosure page. Read it before acting on anything here that reads like a buying recommendation.
Related sites
N100Firewall is run alongside a small number of other single-topic sites:
- OPNsenseLab - OPNsense guides, configs, and hardware for serious homelabs.
- pfSenseLab - pfSense and pfSense Plus configuration for homelabs.
- Firewall Compare - OPNsense vs pfSense vs UniFi — side-by-side firewall comparisons for homelabs
Contact
Email: hello@n100firewall.com
Site: n100firewall.com
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