WatchGuard M370

R

rflcptr

Supreme [H]ardness
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Mar 27, 2008
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I was able to grab one of these in new condition on eBay this morning for less than $30. I anticipate the UTM license is expired for the unit, but I intend to install PFsense anyway. This is all for home lab work and ultimately a dedicated home appliance.

I have been shopping around for similar hardware (bidding on an M400) and am still waiting for arrival of T30 ordered over the weekend to experiment different configurations and topologies. I think I only intend to keep the best of the bunch and sell the rest.

I’m still puzzling over the price: Minus license expiration, why would the M370 be so very low? By WG’s own comparison page, it lacks SFP ports, but outperforms both the M400 and T30 and is a non-EOL product. Were there any outstanding issues with these?

https://www.watchguard.com/wgrd-products/appliances-compare/15016/1342/3592

Thanks!
 
If you visit enough offices you'll find quite of few of these devices just laying around for free. I have a couple sitting in my cupboard of collected IT crap.

Seems Techs either love them or laugh at them.
 
Unexpectedly, I ended up with both the M400 and M370... for free.

I swapped the M370's drive, upgraded the CPU with a spare on hand, and installed pfSense. It's the fastest IPSec server, and firewall generally, that I've owned. No complaints.

The M400 is probably going to be sold again, so I'm weighing whether to swap its CF drive, install pfSense, and be done with it.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
I tried briefly to figure out what hardware is in them and failed...
Click to expand...
Here's some information: https://www.watchguard.com/wgrd-help/documentation/hardware-guides

The as-shipped M370 uses a Lanner NCB-WG4210 mainboard with a Skylake Celeron G3900 CPU and 4 gigabytes of memory. Storage is (now) a Kingston mSATA 120GB SSD. I kept the original 16GB drive with Watchguard's 'FireOS' to ship if/when I ever sell the unit.

Oh, and replacing the quiet noisy stock 40mm fans with three Noctua NF-A4x20 PWM was practically necessary. Now the box is whisper-quiet in the rack and the temperatures are actually no higher than before.
 
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rflcptr said:
The as-shipped M370 uses a Lanner NCB-WG4210 mainboard with a Skylake Celeron G3900 CPU and 8 gigabytes of memory. Storage is (now) a Kingston mSATA 120GB SSD. I kept the original 16GB drive with Watchguard's 'FireOS' to ship if/when I ever sell the unit.
Click to expand...

That should knock pfSense out of the park :)
 
IdiotInCharge said:
That should knock pfSense out of the park :)
Click to expand...
Can't complain. :D

edit: my mistake, it has 4 gigabytes of memory. It has another slot so I could add a 4 gigabyte DIMM to get dual-channel mode working...
 

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rflcptr said:
Unexpectedly, I ended up with both the M400 and M370... for free.

I swapped the M370's drive, upgraded the CPU with a spare on hand, and installed pfSense. It's the fastest IPSec server, and firewall generally, that I've owned. No complaints.

The M400 is probably going to be sold again, so I'm weighing whether to swap its CF drive, install pfSense, and be done with it.
Click to expand...
I realize this was a while ago, but do you recall what CPU you replaced the stock one with?

Thank you.
 
rflcptr said:
I’m still puzzling over the price: Minus license expiration, why would the M370 be so very low? By WG’s own comparison page, it lacks SFP ports, but outperforms both the M400 and T30 and is a non-EOL product. Were there any outstanding issues with these?
Click to expand...
I'm glad this thread got bumped because I have an answer to this question. The reason it's so cheap is because people just don't know enough about these. They're extremely powerful even without any of the extra licenses and keep working on their current version even after eol--that's the only thing you can't do--download any new versions since the eol ones won't have any more. Aside from that they 'just work' and have capabilities far beyond anything needed in the home like multi-wan, vlan, ipsec tunnels and more. If more people knew about them, no one would even bother to change them to pfsense since they're pretty solid as-is.

What did you end up doing with the M400 and T30? Are they still stock? What version of fireware is on them? If they're just sitting around, I may want to play with them and can send you a prepaid UPS label for them if you're done with them.
 
rflcptr said:
Oh, and replacing the quiet noisy stock 40mm fans with three Noctua NF-A4x20 PWM was practically necessary. Now the box is whisper-quiet in the rack and the temperatures are actually no higher than before.
Click to expand...
Good to know about the fans--I think our older M200 is pretty silent once working, especially since the cpu usage doesn't go above 0 even with everything we have going on, lol.
 
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