Firewalla occupies an unusual slot in a homelab. It is not quite a router in the UniFi sense and not quite a firewall in the OPNsense sense. It is a small Linux box, with a polished mobile app on top, that sits inline on your WAN and decides what gets out and what does not. There are four current models — Purple, Gold SE, Gold, and Gold Plus — and every one of them ships in a desktop chassis that nobody at Firewalla seems to have designed for a rack. That is the gap this post tries to fill: where each model sits in a homelab, what it actually needs to mount cleanly, and what the airflow, cable, and clearance picture looks like once you put it in a 10-inch cabinet next to a switch.
None of the four units ship with rack ears. None of them have rear-facing power inputs. The Gold and Gold Plus have side vents that you do not want pressed against another chassis. The Purple is so small that the temptation is to leave it on a shelf and never speak of it again, which works fine until you decide the shelf is the bottom of a 10-inch cabinet and the cabinet is mounted to the wall.
The Four Models, in One Paragraph Each
The Firewalla Purple is the size of a thick deck of cards. It runs four 1 Gbps Ethernet ports in a row on one short edge, takes USB-C power, and does its job at very low wattage. As a security appliance for a 1 Gbps WAN it is fine; the moment your ISP upgrades you to anything north of a gigabit it becomes the bottleneck. In a homelab it tends to live in front of a small UniFi or pfSense setup as a deep-packet-inspection layer rather than the actual gateway.
The Firewalla Gold (original, sometimes called Gold v1) is a small black aluminium box, palm-and-a-half wide, with four 1 Gbps RJ45 ports on the front and a single fan on the side. It was the model that put the Gold line on homelab maps. Throughput is honest gigabit with IPS on, and the chassis runs warm but not loud.
The Firewalla Gold SE is the same idea as the Gold, redesigned for 2.5 Gbps WAN environments. The chassis is smaller and slimmer than the original Gold, and the ports across the front are 2.5G-rated. It is the model most homelabbers are buying in 2026 because it matches the speed of the cable modems most ISPs are now installing.
The Firewalla Gold Plus is the heaviest of the lot — a deeper, taller chassis with 2.5G copper ports plus two SFP+ cages for 10G uplinks. It runs hotter than the others, draws more power, and is the only one with the headroom to do IPS at 10G symmetric. If you have a homelab that pushes a fiber WAN above 2.5 Gbps, this is the only one that keeps up.
Firewalla Purple in a 10-Inch Cabinet
Mounting the Purple in a rack is almost a category error. It is a 116 mm by 76 mm puck. It does not need ventilation — the whole chassis is its heatsink — and the cable bundle off the back is small. The challenge is not thermal. The challenge is that the Purple presents four front-facing RJ45 ports that you almost certainly want to terminate at the rack mouth, not buried somewhere behind a bracket.
The cleanest pattern is a 1U sled with two keystone breakouts beside the puck. The Purple sits with its ports facing into the rack; two of those ports are jumpered to keystones on the front of the bracket so the WAN-in and the LAN-out are both first-class citizens. The remaining two ports stay inside the cabinet for whatever auxiliary roles you give them — a management port, a second LAN segment, a dedicated DMZ. The 10" Firewalla Purple Rack Mount - 1U w/2 Keystones uses exactly that pattern; the keystones are user-supplied so you can pick Cat6 or Cat6A depending on what the rest of your patching is.
One note on the Purple specifically: the USB-C power input is on the side, not the back. If you mount the puck so the ports face one direction, the power cable comes out perpendicular to the data cables, which means the cable bundle inside the cabinet has a 90-degree turn near the device. Plan a millimetre of slack accordingly. A right-angle USB-C adapter cleans this up if it bothers you.
Firewalla Gold SE: The 2026 Default
The Gold SE is, for most homelabs, the model worth designing the rack around. It is small enough to share a 1U slot with a keystone breakout, fast enough that it will not bottleneck a typical ISP install for a few years, and it costs less than the Gold Plus. The chassis is roughly 175 mm wide, which leaves room on either side of it inside a 10-inch cabinet for a vertical cable channel. It does not have a top fan, but it does have grille holes on the lid; you do not want a switch sitting directly on top of it.
Mount the Gold SE so that its port face is the front of the rack. The 10" Firewalla Gold SE Rack Mount - 1U bracket holds the chassis at the standard 1U pitch (44.45 mm, per EIA-310-D, even in a 10-inch rack) with the four 2.5G ports flush to the front. The power input on the Gold SE is on the back of the chassis, which means the AC cable lives entirely behind the bracket — the cleanest cable picture of any Firewalla model.
The gotcha: the Gold SE's internal fan is a side-throw design, not a front-to-back airflow pattern. In an open shelf the side venting is fine. In a 10-inch cabinet with side panels, the warm exhaust hits the inside of the cabinet wall and has to find its way up. Leave a half-U of vertical gap below the next device, or stack a vented blanking panel above the Gold SE to give the heat somewhere to go.
Firewalla Gold and Gold Plus: When You Need More
The original Firewalla Gold is still in plenty of homelabs. There is no current 10-inch bracket for the original Gold in this catalog, so if you are running one and want it in a 10-inch cabinet, the practical options are a sled-style shelf or an adjacent-bracket adapter. (If you are picking between the original Gold and the Gold SE for a new build today, the SE is the obvious answer unless you already own a Gold and can't justify replacing it.)
The Gold Plus is a different beast. It is roughly a third deeper than the Gold SE, draws more power under load, and ships with a more aggressive internal fan. Mounted in a 10-inch cabinet it will run, but you should be honest about what you are asking it to do. The 2 SFP+ cages on the back are the headline feature; both modules — and the optics or DAC cables you put in them — generate heat in their own right. A pair of 10G fiber transceivers can add 3–4 W each on top of the chassis baseline.
The 10" Firewalla Gold Plus Rack Mount - 1U bracket holds the Gold Plus with the SFP+ cages at the rear and the 2.5G copper ports at the front. The intentional bias here is that fiber uplinks tend to be terminated at the back of a cabinet (where the WAN drop and the core-switch trunk both live) and copper LAN ports want to be at the front. If your topology is the opposite — fiber at the front, copper at the back — flip the bracket. There is no thermal reason to prefer one orientation.
Heat is the real constraint with the Gold Plus. In a sealed 10-inch cabinet without active ventilation, expect interior air a few degrees above the chassis exhaust within an hour of cold start. That is fine for the Gold Plus itself, which is rated to operate up to 40 °C ambient, but it is enough to stress an adjacent fanless switch sitting two U above. Add a small 80 mm cabinet fan, or run vented blanking panels above and below the Gold Plus to create a chimney effect.
Cable Management Around a Firewalla
Every Firewalla model presents the same shape of cable problem: a small number of high-traffic Ethernet ports clustered tightly on one face. There is no neat way to fan four cables out of an 80 mm-wide port array without overlap. A few patterns that work:
- Color-code the four ports. One WAN, one LAN trunk to the core switch, one to a management VLAN, one spare. Use four colors of patch cable in 0.3 m or 0.5 m lengths. The visual rule beats labelling, especially at 2 a.m.
- Keep WAN on the outside edge. The WAN port sees the cable that is most likely to be re-pulled when the ISP changes hardware. Put it on the leftmost or rightmost slot so you can replace it without disturbing the rest.
- Strain-relieve before the bracket. Anything heavier than a Cat6 patch cable wants a velcro tie to the bracket itself. The RJ45 latches on the Firewalla front are plastic and not designed to hold the weight of a 3-meter Cat6A run hanging in air.
- Use the keystone breakouts on the Purple bracket if you have them. Two patch cables from the Purple to the front-panel keystones, then two short jumpers from those keystones into the rack — this turns the Firewalla front into a flat patching surface, which is what you want for daily-driver ports.
Power, PoE, and the Things Firewalla Does Not Do
Firewalla units are not PoE devices. They take their own DC power inputs (USB-C on the Purple, barrel-jack or AC inlets on the Gold-class) and there is no version of the line that accepts PoE in. This matters for two reasons. First, your rack PDU has to budget for a Firewalla in addition to whatever PoE is on your switch. Second, a Firewalla cannot ride on a UPS that powers your switch only via PoE — it needs a real, mains-class UPS connection.
The 10" Firewalla Gold Plus Rack Mount - 1U assumes a standard IEC C13 inlet on the back of the chassis; the Gold SE bracket assumes a barrel-jack on the back. If you are mixing models and trying to standardize on a single rack PDU outlet count, this is the difference that will surprise you. A Gold Plus and a Gold SE in the same rack want two outlets of distinctly different shapes upstream of them.
Where Firewalla Fits in a UniFi-Centric Homelab
A common homelab pattern in 2026: UniFi for switching and Wi-Fi, Firewalla for security. The Firewalla sits between the ISP modem and the UniFi gateway, in transparent-bridge or router mode depending on whether you want the UniFi gateway to keep doing routing. The advantage is that Firewalla's per-device visibility and DPI complement the UniFi controller's relatively coarse traffic dashboard. The disadvantage is that you now have two devices doing some kind of inspection on the same packets.
If you are running this stack in a 10-inch cabinet, the bracket order top-to-bottom is usually: ISP modem, Firewalla, UniFi gateway, switch, patch panel. Each one is 1U. A typical setup like this fits in 5U with a bit of vertical cable slack. The 10" Firewalla Gold SE Rack Mount - 1U sits naturally in this stack with its port face matching the rest of the front-facing devices around it.
Wrap-Up
The Firewalla line is built around a software experience that does not care what the chassis looks like, which is part of why it has never been a rack-friendly product. The good news is that the chassis are small enough, and consistent enough across the line, that a 1U bracket per model gets you most of the way there. The exception is the original Gold, which predates the current bracket lineup and which the rest of this catalog has not caught up to yet.
For a 2026 homelab build, the Gold SE in a 10-inch 1U bracket is the default. The Purple bracket exists for the people who specifically want the Purple's price-and-DPI combination as a layer in front of a different gateway. The Gold Plus exists for the genuinely-fiber-at-home crowd, and it earns its rack space if your WAN does too.
