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Finding newer compatible NIC hardware that is supported by Sophos firewall home is becoming increasingly difficult

This is becoming an exercise in frustration trying to find a newer device on which to run the Sophos UTM or XG.

Years ago when fanless dual NIC PCs used the Intel i211 chipset, it was supported by Sophos, despite them being made for "consumer use".

Now recently there are a plethora of very fast, efficient fanless PCs that have the upgraded Intel i225 chipsets, yet they are not supported due to them being designed for consumers according to what is said on the forums here.

Most home internet connections are becoming fast enough that the much slower CPUs used in these devices with the supported older NICs cannot keep up with the demands of the IPS.

Sophos still will not release the version 3 of Snort which supports multithreading which can take advantage of multiple CPU cores, instead relying on their proprietary  "Xstream Flow" technology which utilizes a separate CPU for just the IPS/DPI in the XGS devices which are marketed towards business.

It would be great if Sophos could simply put out a list of supported NIC chipsets, but they won't, and the hardware compatibility database (I used comic sans on purpose) is more like personal anecdotes of hardware that should work, the "updated" hardware compatibility list (comic sans again) doesn't even exist. support.sophos.com/.../KB-000034600

I suppose the only way to tell is to find out what linux kernel the UTM 9.7 is using and then see what Intel drivers are included in that kernel.



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  • Initially, yes that was the one I was thinking of, but was quite sure we had more going on here than what I can read.  Of course, I could just be carb loaded into hazy, old age, holiday loaded, egg nogged out of my mind.

    OPNSense 64-bit | Intel Xeon 4-core v3 1225 3.20Ghz
    16GB Memory | 500GB SSD HDD | ATT Fiber 1GB
    (Former Sophos UTM Veteran, Former XG Rookie)