I have used Firewalla Gold for over 5 years, and love it. I upgraded WiFi to Firewalla AP7, and had made household devices so much more connected with high speeds. Ran out of ports on Gold router, so things have gotten pieced together and messy. Main setup is in our bedroom closet, wife yells at me all the time how ugly it is. However she is very happy everything works so well 
Gold Pro with dual ISP’s, layer 3 routing with Fortinet firewall, multigig switch and WiFi 7 AP’s behind it. I would like to get rid of the Fortinet stack but the only thing missing in the Firewalla stack is the switching!
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I have a Wingbits and Mastchain devices on pi’s in my setup 
This my daughter’s firewalla purple stuffed into a wooden case so it looks nice in her college dorm room. With the dual-band wifi access point and some cooling fans, it’s like a tiny usb-powered server rack.
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Whoa, look at all that dust, Purple sitting on top of the Kef speakers. Time to clean. AP7 is up near top by the 9 foot ceiling.
I’ve been wanting an excuse to properly document this setup, so here goes. My Firewalla Gold Plus has been running my network for months now, and it’s turned into a proper hobby I’ve learnt so much since purchasing it. I’ve worked through DoH bypass prevention, blocked Apple Private Relay, set up VPN bypass rules, guest network isolation, and quarantine rules for new devices. OISD BIG is my main blocklist these days.
Most of the effort has gone into IoT control. My Eufy cameras and baby monitor each sit in their own device groups with strict internet-block rules, which paid off when I caught a DEAS C22 camera quietly uploading footage to Chinese cloud IPs. It had been doing this in the background until I went looking, a good reminder that “smart” devices need watching, not just trusting.
The rest of the network is currently a TP-Link Deco mesh for WiFi, a NAS handling storage and Time Machine backups, and a Raspberry Pi 5 alongside a Mac mini M4 Pro waiting on a Home Assistant and Ollama project I keep putting off. I’m actually planning to retire the Decos altogether and replace them with 4 Firewalla APs, so the whole network (routing, switching, and WiFi) sits inside one ecosystem instead of stitching Firewalla’s visibility on top of someone else’s mesh.
If I won a Switch, the first thing I’d do is move from device-group segmentation to proper VLANs, separating cameras and IoT, the NAS, and AV gear at the port level rather than just the firewall level. Combined with the AP upgrade, it would close the gap between blocking traffic and physically isolating it, with everything finally managed from one place.
And yes, the cable management behind it all is a bit of a disaster (see photo two), so this might be a stronger entry for “needs the most TLC” than “best setup.”
I need a switch for all of my “vintage/legacy” devices that don’t support WPA3 but have an ethernet connection. Not need to upgrade my perfectly working devices to create more e-waste.
Setup is 2GB fiber connection comes into firewalla and then into a Zyxel switch. I use a Synology for a home NAS that serves iSCSI to proxmox mini server across a dedicated cable. The firewalla segments everything using vlans for my home network devices (IoT, vm servers, personal devices, etc). I run wifi 7 ubiquity APs for wifi with the unifi controller hosted on the server. I also use two fans for pulling air into the cabinet and pushing the exhaust between the wall and to crawl space. I do need to organize the cabling and utilize the space some more for sure 
My meager home set up, but I love it- it works great for me. I could use a better modem and I have an old TP Link switch, but Im pleased.
Here’s my simple setup… There’s a bigger story about how it came to be.
I am “in the industry”; my profession is in Networks and Security for enterprise organizations. My son is 11 years old. He has a way to find areas of opportunity and loves a challenge around “parental controls.”
We relocated in January. “ISP” said, “We got unbeatable parental controls.” What ISP doesn’t say that, I guess… Yet, moving from rural country to a metro area - I tried it out. My son was able to break the controls within 72 hours!
I researched and purchased a device that is turned out to be a branded VPN. That created another layer of control and did not help. In fact, it created loops and tunnels that my son found easier access. I, the “seasoned professional”, was losing grip on reality and the matrix!
Friends suggested U@&+y, and I had a laundry list of enterprise-labeled gear to consider and research. On deeper dives and tossing the list out, I fortunately found, FIREWALLA!
I went all in, no hesitation, after what I read. I purchased a modem to feed the new network. Firewalla Gold SE to the AP 7. Yes, that’s the failover configured to hop on a 5G hotspot or Starlink if I am home… That’s the simple architecture.
The app controls and interior are game-changing! My son is unable to beat it - after three months or so… Content, App controls, Security pulls, block ICMP ping on ports, schedules, routing, segments, etc… All have been amazing!
Side note - My wife works from home too. Because of the segmenting and qVLAN built-in - when her work was a Malware victim - we remained safe! Thank you, Firewalla!
I want to highlight the VPN availability. My son’s devices are now bound to the VPN when off our LAN. If you know, you know… It’s pure parental empowerment! For me, I can VPN on and print at home no matter where I am! (This has been a want for a while.)
As I continue to expand outward in business, I find more time roaming around on my Starlink connections. Adding to the private network layer while roaming is the idea. While winning is fun, I wanted to share the story of the impact Firewalla enhanced in our lives. It’s simple, clean, and doesnt need to be complicated. 
Thank you,
Trey
P.S. I have been in some absolute rats nests of network closets, the IT guy next to me, sucking on a lollypop, declaring his posture and netwrok are “good.” These closets burned in my brain would have broke the glass on my camera lens - so no messy pictures here. 
ATT fiber setup in passthrough to firewalla then from that to Eero in bridge mode for wifi access point and from that a netgear switch for anything that needs wired connection.
Took a while to get here. The house renovations were when my wife “allowed” me to run Cat6 round the whole place, and I finally bagged my own home office out in the garage. Whole house now runs off this one rack. Netgear switch, Firewalla Gold Plus holding it all together, APC underneath for when the power has other ideas. Got 2 gig internet coming in too. The only thing throttling me now is that Netgear switch, which can only do gigabit, so it’s living on borrowed time. The cable management is more modern art than best practice, but it has never let me down. The blue glow is mainly there to stop you counting how many cables I left two feet too long.
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It’s a work in progress in our brand new house. I have a rack mounted firewalla gold pro router, Trendnet 10G switch, firewalla desktop router and 2 firewalla ceiling units.
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I highly doubt I have the best or the worst, but I am proud of it and where I think I can go with the new Firewalla Switches! I have been having Gemini help me design my new network topology with all of my services laid out… uses the new new Fiirewalla switch at the core. Gemini can generate mermaid markup language. Works great!
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I have a firewalla purple SE and I’m debating upgrading to a firewalla gold plus and getting two Firewalla APs.
Currently my modem is directly connected to my purple se. I have my firewalla in Router mode and my Tplink router in bridged mode aka AP mode. I use my Tplink as a switch and my Netgear unmanaged switch doesn’t work well. Also have a Eufy(I block china on my firewalla) homebase 3 wired in and a Google TV streamer wired in from the other room. It’s not much, but I have big plans once my budget permits. I have a lot of wireless devices as well. Using my firewalla has been great. I can’t wait to upgrade and get more organized with a quarter rack.
Bro what are you hosting??? Look at all that fiber…
This setup has a few VLANS, HAM, PC, IOT and Apartment. Also, two uplinks, Starlink and Optico Fiber. I would like to use a one vendor solution for integration and performance purposes.
Running Office Computers, POS stations, Credit Cards, Television and customer WiFi through my setup. I could sure use a Firewalla Switch to complete this setup. Good luck to everyone.
