Buying a used XGS 107

Salut Stephane,

you will be better off running a home license on your own hardware. This will give you more power than a small XG107 for sure and should be no problem with a home license.

Thanks Philipp

Understood. But my plan was to get trained up in Sophos product offerings and get certified at some point and be in a position to offer services. Can’t really get anywhere with a home license

I get the impression Sophos is a bit of walled garden and unless you have an established IT company with a certain client based, you don’t get to enter. 

You're talking about two separate things. In the purely technical and training sense, what jp says is true; you'd be better with home. In relation to the hardware, I'd personally not touch anything smaller than a 135.

In terms of becoming a sophos partner/mssp - it's a more complex question. 

$200 is very cheap and you know what they say about "if it looks to good to be true, it probably is". Might be stolen. Almost certainly registered. When someone buys a Sophos firewall, it gets registered to the customer by the seller and, in theory, you can't licence it unless you are that customer. I don't know how that works in practice because I've never tried licencing a firewall when we or the customer aren't the registered owner. There is a process to transfer to a new customer but this has to be agreed to by the existing customer.

You can put a home licence on any hardware including Sophos firewall hardware. You will usually find plenty of decommissioned Sophos kit on auction sites, both Sophos XG and SG firewalls. You need to know a bit about what you are doing though because some firewalls with the same name, e.g.  XG 135, have 3 versions and anything but the newest version can be pretty slow. The advantage of using old Sophos hardware is you know the hardware is supported, they have plenty of NICs and it can be cheaper than buying something new. The problem is that you have to replace the hard drive or find a utility to wipe track zero on the hard drive before you can install the home version (otherwise it insists you install the hardware version that requires a retail licence). Also, Home will not take advantage of any of the Sophos specific hardware. For example, if you installed Home on an XGS model, I don't believe it would use the dedicated flow processor. That doesn't matter in a lab.

If you decide to buy your own hardware, make sure that the NICs are supported otherwise it won't work.

If you are using it purely in a lab then any model should suffice. I don't know what the XGS 107 is like but the web interface on its predecessor, the XG 106 was painfully slow and may be frustrating to use in a lab where you are making a lot of changes.

Thanks for the info. Seller reduced to $100! 

I dusted off my old Dell Inspiron Intel Core 2 Duo w 4gb ram, installed SFOS home on it. Runs pretty good. Registered to Sophos Central.. that is very cool. I currently manage Peplink devices through their inControl2 cloud platform.

So questions remain wirth licensing.. I presume Sophos Central isn't free, and I will lose my FW cloud management.

I have reached out to Sophos sales and asked about deploying Sophos endpoint security into non profits such as churches etc... hoping I get a reply back. 

But using XG home on older PCs and deploying them in family members homes for free, and managing them from Sophos Central would be really great.

I am not sure, if XGS are actually able to run XG Home. XG Home requires officially a Intel CPU. XGS uses Ryzen + NPU. But you will not use the NPU with a Software Installation. 

Sophos CM is free for the 7 day version, it has limited functions, but manages firewall, APs and reports even backups but stores them for 7 days only.

Ian