Sophos Firewall Home Edition V20 - A Free NGFW for your Homelab and a XG135 to run it on

Sophos have offered home use versions of there firewall solutions for years, first with the UTM(SG) range and then with the XG since Sophos launched it. Now V20 has become available for the home licensed users lets get it running on an older XG135 and compare it to a new XGS136 appliance to see how it stacks up

While not for use in production its always been a fully featured product with only a Core and memory limit which generally don't impact its use for most home lab environments, and as far as I'm aware its the only 100% free NGFW available

So join me in loading it up and getting full TLS inspection working to see the impact this has on performance

Find me on:

If you are a UK business looking for IT support, please get in touch with us over at:

Looking for New/Refurbished Servers and equipment for your Business? Homelab?

[Martin-pjfe]

Thanks for the video!

For anyone reading, I was able to format the SSD by booting Gparted off a USB (using Rufus and formatting as DD) and clearing the existing partition table and formatting the whole SSD as FAT32. After that I booted the Sophos Home Edition off a USB and it let me install no worries

[RAM-]

Thank you for doing this video Jim, I purchased a XG125 about 9 months ago and not one person over on the Sophos Community could tell me how to get it flashed correctly not even the official tech support guys.

[DilsonAbraham]

Enjoyed the video. Hope to see more of setting up the Sophos and configuring it for various scenarios.

[kurtfile]

Great video. I really appreciated how to set it up for protection.

[hallcrash]

Thanks so much. This video gave me so much information. Great work 👍.

[wilmerrizalde]

I have this sophos fw for my home ^_^

It was installed a year and half ago on a base metal small factor hp desktop. 124watts, 1 VoIP, 2 access point and a modem ^_^

[fritzlott]

The replacement SSD is a M.2 2244. The "2244" indicates the physical size of the M.2.

[mikescott]

Nice video :) Need to install XG V20 again, I've missed a 135 Rev 3 a few times recently from eBay, so still on a XG 125 Rev3 at the moment. Family member wise, waiting for UK stock of the Unifi Cloud Gateway Ultra. I've deployed a Unifi Express to another family member and pretty ok, but not sure I'd get another. XG230 Rev 2 under my desk with 10Gb SFP+ module card installed, but not using it atm. My XG125 Rev 3 has a pfsense + license on it until 2025. One thing that is dead completely now and I don't think many care is Untangle Home

[SZF]

Going to build out a new Proxmox server soon with some additional NICs, moving away from MikroTik as a firewall (keeping it around since I don’t want to buy a new switch). So far testing in virtual environments has been good, can’t wait to put in to practice.

[KevinRussellT]

Thanks so much for posting as I'm looking at putting one of these in my house since I really like the features of our corporate firewall. Would you still recommend the xg135 rev 3 currently?

[cornevandervyver]

Nice video, well presented. When you did a screen share we could not see any of the details on the admin panel. I think it would be better to be able to see it clearly and test how it looks on a mobile device.

[ollienet]

Great video thanks for your clear instructions :) I am currently running Sophos XG home on an old HP desktop. Is it possible to import the config into the XG86 that I will be installing Home on?

[JasonsLabVideos]

ME FIRST !! I win ! Oh, and Opnsense with Zenarmor is free and will act JUST like a NextGen FW with ALL UTM features too !

[zack..]

Great video.
I am thinking to run Sophos Home Edition. Currently evaluating the XG 135 vs Protectli hardware.
I understand the Home edition limitation of the 4x Core and 6GB Ram.
My thinking is while you may not be able to get around the RAM limitation, you may be able to to benefit from the CPU with a more powerful 4 core. Would like to hear any thoughts on this...

[KevinRussellT]

Just wondering if the XG135 has a dedicated switch chip for the 8 ports?

[kevinroth]

Hi Jim, thank you for these videos as they are very instructional. I was planning on buying a Sophos XG 125W Rev.3 and installing the Sophos Home OS. I know there are some hurdles with the SSD and MBR not allowing this. My question is: Would I be able to let's say reformat and clean the SSD with something like Hiren's Boot CD and then install the Sophos Home ISO? Just trying to avoid replacing the SSD if possible.

[danielshirilla]

Do you know if the internal AP of the 135W works with XG home?

[rollothomasy]

How does this test perform on the XG 450? I assume the xeon will be a lot better than the atom in the XG135, but the cpu/memory limitations would throttle it a bit - curious by how much though. In terms of home NGFW - is Untangle comparable to Sophos XG home? Even at $150 per year for the full home license, that may be worth while if it gives you all of the NGFW functionality as well as full access to your hardware.

[PoetofHateSpeech]

Just a quick question. Why go for an appliance that costs more than a mini dual ethernet pc?

[linearburn]

try a usb to hdmi adapter on the newer box