Want to buy SG105 for home use - licensing and support?

Hi Igor,

You won't have any phone support on a home license. Your only means of support will be this forum..... And yes, it is possible to convert a SG105 to a Home license, but it will require you to first basic setup the SG105 and then change a filename (or delete it) using ssh before you can reinstall it with the Software release of the UTM software.

You do need this Software release for your home license, but if you don't alter the filename you cannot install this release onto an appliance.

The file you need to rename is etc/asg (if i recall correctly).

Hi, Igor, and welcome to the UTM Community!

The SG105 is not a good choice for home use.  You will be better off getting a non-Sophos unit with more RAM and a faster CPU.  Fellow member William has posted extensively here about Snort and throughput limitations.  See BarryG's thread at the top of this forum.

Cheers - Bob

i used a Supermicro A1SRi-2558F with a 2.4 ghz atom and got 200mbit with ips active. a sg135 has similar hardware.

I've gotta say, I'm loving my old ASG320 as a home firewall using Home License. It's user friendly, but will take time to learn. Yes, you can put the home license on and use UTM9. I highly recommend it. No personal experience with the SG105, though. I'm using an ancient ASG320 v1... heh. 

Hi Igor,

don't buy a SG105 for home use. We bougth one for the daugther of our CEO for home use. It's monitored by our SUM. Permanently it runs out of resources.

As Bob said, try to get a non-Sophos pc (choice fanless) and install the soft-appliance on that.

I agree with the consensus of not running Sophos Home on Sophos hardware.

If you're looking for something reasonably powerful, but in a small, efficient form factor, check out a micro-PC.

I'm running Sophos Home on this:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01KX9OU58/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I threw in a 120GB SSD and 8GB of RAM and it runs like a champ.

Hi Igor,

If You like to have full support You should have a look on the SG105 basic guard bundle. It's the smallest and cheapest support bundle.

Bye CS

Interesting idea, CS.  I wonder if it's possible to purchase only a Premium Support subscription.  I wonder if Support would work on a unit with a home-use license if the individual owned a license not on the device.

Cheers - Bob

I investigated and found that a 3 year licence and hardware was going to be cheaper than the last hardware I bought.

The issue being with the SG105 is what is the maximum internet speed you can get to work on the device. To me it looked like a SG115 would be needed for most home users 4gb and about 95mb/s throughput which I did not look at cost.

The advantages are no IP limit upto hardware overload, supposed support.

But being a fiddler (the pun being I can't fiddle and I am always off key) I choose to buy more hardware which is a way overkill, quad core e3, 8gb and some ssd I had lying around on a server MB.

I do look at the specifications of both UTM and XG and wonder what world the developers (hardware) live in. My home system without too many users UTM uses about 4gb and my XG uses 2.5gb, but the basic systems sell with 2gb get real guys. 4gb of ram is not that expensive, in fact trying to buy 2gb of ram probably costs more.

We bought two SG105 and are more than disapointed.

One of them (#1) is used at home. Family with three kids. All kids are to young to have pcs or mobiles. The second (#2) is used in a very small office of us. At this time nobody is in that office.
But bouth SG105 are running out of ressources:

The UTM220 at the bottom of the screenshot is my home hardware ;-)