How to get NextGen Firewall to your home absolutely free

Hello! Today we will talk about how to get a product enterprise class with full functionality to your home absolutely free.
For home, I use the following features:

• filter the web traffic of home users (modern Internet, even with legitimate use, can be insidious for home users);
  
• I will arrange the connection between apartments and a summer house (this allows you to drive a multicast 4K movie stream from a server minidlna through a VPN tunnel to a TV in another apartment (UpLink'i 100 Mbit each))
  
• I protect the local Nextcloud server with WAF
  

Interesting? Then welcome under cat.

We all know that in our favorite Internet there are a lot of dangers for the average user. Many of us are faced with the fact that their households (children, parents, grandparents) pick up different infections on their home computers, and then we, as “programmers”, have to clean all this rubbish with a hot iron (format c :). Also, who has home servers, sooner or later wondered about protecting them from “cool hackers”, evil bots, hacking through exploits, etc. 99% of these problems can be preemptively filtered on the firewall, not allowing, for example, mothers to switch from Yandex search results to a bad website with lots of viruses, or see and block an attempt to exploit a well-known exploit in the old version of Apache or a plug-in WordPress, if it didn’t have time update it on your home server, or the developers did not have time to bury the critical vulnerability in their product.
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“And what is this solution that closes all these problems?” You ask, and I will answer - this is Sophos XG Firewall , I ask you to love and favor. Here is information about the product and briefly about the vendor:

Sophos was founded in 1985 in Oxford, UK. The company has more than 3,300 employees. The company has development centers and offices around the world. It deals exclusively with products to ensure comprehensive security at all levels of the network: the only one in the world that is the leader of Gartner quadrants in several directions at once: UTM and antivirus.

Sophos XG Firewall Enterprise Level Solution, belongs to the NextGen Firewall (NGFW) class. The main difference from the classic Firewall is that the user is in the protection center, and not the protocols or ports, as in the classic Firewall.

Functional and license names:


It should be noted that the product already has full-featured Web Application Firewall, antispam and flexible reporting for all modules.

Do not be afraid of the word "license". For commercial use, the product is really paid. But for home use the product is completely free. “Where is the catch?” You ask. Everyone knows that we only have free cheese ... And here we come to the most interesting, to the limitations of the free home version, yes, of course, there are limitations:

• You can not put a home version for commercial use;
• can not be put on a machine with more than 4 cores and 6 GB of RAM;
• won't be able to use the sandbox.

And that's all, there are no more restrictions. Neither by functionality, nor by the number of users, nor by the databases of signatures, nor by anything else. There are no more differences from the purchased product with FullGuard license. And there is no trick. Take and use.

You do not believe? Then I propose to download and see for yourself. So what do you need to earn this wonderful product?

1. Iron server or virtual machine with no more than 4 cores and 6 GB of RAM (by the way, this is enough to ensure the security of more than 30 active users and not even sweat)
2. SSD not less than 64 GB
3. At least 2 network interfaces (LAN and WAN)

Supported virtualization platforms:

1. VMware
2. Hyper-v
3. KVM
4. Citrix xenapp
5. Microsoft Azure

For each of these platforms, there is an already pre-configured virtual machine with pre-installed tools and drivers for the hypervisor.

We proceed directly to the process of obtaining our home license. We will need any foreign VPN. All further actions must be performed from under the ip address of another country.

First of all, you need to have a personal account on the Sophos website, from where we can later download distributions, manage licenses, etc. This can be done very simply by following this link: https://id.sophos.com/
Before you open an authorization window, we will need to click on the Create Sophos ID button:


Then fill in all the fields and click on Register.


Then we go to our email, follow the link in the email, create a password and log in to our new personal account. Everything, we have created.

Go to the free Sophos products page at this link.
https://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/free-tools.aspx

Scroll to the Sophos XG Firewall Home Edition section and click Download. On the next page, click on the Get Started button.



Fill in the information about yourself:



The main thing is that the email you specify here matches the email to which you have registered your Sophos portal.

After these steps, you will see this message about a successful request:



On this page, you can immediately download the software version of XG. Click on the Download button, accept the license agreement and click on Submit. The download of the .iso image of the Sophos XG Firewall will begin, which can be deployed on any x86 hardware.



A letter should arrive in the mail with a home license key for Sophos XG Firewall



If you need a virtual machine image, then do the following:

We go directly to the MySophos portal itself and log in with our account that we created earlier.



Then click on the left menu on the Network Protection -> Download Installers and we get to the page where you can download both the Software disk image and the images of the Sophos XG Firewall virtual machines.



Choose which version is right for your hypervisor.

Click on the Download button and see the page with the license agreement, accept and click on, everything is the same as the Software version.

As a result, we received an installation disk with the system and a license key with full functionality up to 2999 years.

Then you can start to solve your specific home tasks. You can start by reading the Getting Starting Guide for Software version in English and Russian . Then go to the official documentation and an open knowledge base .

Thank you for your time.

If you have questions about the commercial version of XG Firewall, you can contact us - Factor Group , a Sophos distributor. It is enough to write in free form at sophos@fgts.ru .