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Firewall and lab images: which ones you can get free from the vendor, and what to do when the only copy is a Baidu link

Updated 21 September 2026 · 7 min read

You are building a lab for PCNSE, CCSA, NSE4 or just to break things safely. You find a Chinese blog with one Baidu Pan link that claims to hold everything — every firewall image, every version, 40GB in one folder.

Before you spend anything getting that link open: three of the four images most people want are free from the vendor, legally, today. This post says which, what each free tier actually gives you, what is genuinely locked, and what to do in the case where the Chinese mirror really is the only copy left.

Checked September 2026.

Get these from the vendor — they cost nothing

Image	How	What you get free
Check Point Gaia	User Center account at checkpoint.com	Full install ISO. Registration is free and takes a minute.
FortiGate-VM	FortiCloud account, then activate the VM trial	A permanent trial licence — it does not expire
VMware ESXi 8.0U3e	Broadcom Support Portal account	The free hypervisor, non-production, no Broadcom support
pfSense CE / OPNsense	Direct download, no account	Everything. Open source.

Two of those deserve detail, because the free tier has real edges:

FortiGate-VM's permanent trial is genuinely permanent, but it is capped: 1 vCPU, 2 GiB RAM, a maximum of three interfaces, three firewall policies and three routes, low-encryption only, and no FortiCare support. That is enough to learn the CLI and the policy model, and not enough for a multi-VDOM topology. Older FortiOS builds used a 15-day evaluation instead; the permanent trial arrived in 7.2.1.

Free ESXi came back in 2025 after Broadcom removed it. ESXi 8.0 Update 3e is a free download with the licence embedded in the installer — no key to paste. You still need a Broadcom account, it is for non-production use, and there is no support.

If your lab only needs these, stop here. You do not need a mirror, you do not need us, and a file from the vendor is a file whose hash you can trust.

What is actually locked

Palo Alto VM-Series. This is the one people genuinely cannot get. The images live in the Customer Support Portal, and they only appear on your download page if your account has an active VM-Series entitlement — a support account alone is not enough. There is no free lab tier of PAN-OS. This is why every "PCNSE home lab" thread eventually ends up pointing at a mirror.

Cisco IOS / IOSv / IOU images. Entitlement-gated in the same way. Cisco's answer for labs is CML, which is a paid product.

Older builds of anything. Vendors publish the current release. The build your book, your course or your employer's production box runs on was pulled two years ago.

OEM custom images. The Dell/HPE/Lenovo ESXi builds that carry the drivers your second-hand server needs to boot — not on the free download page.

Chinese vendor gear. Huawei paused public sharing of eNSP after 2019; eNSP Pro goes to training institutions and dealers. H3C, Ruijie and ZTE material is largely in Chinese-language circulation only. If you are studying HCIA/HCIP from outside China, this is the wall you hit.

For that last group, Chinese technical blogs are frequently the last public copy — and in China, the default place to put a 40GB folder is Baidu Pan.

When the only copy is a Baidu link

The link is a pan.baidu.com share address ending in ?pwd= and four characters, where the characters after ?pwd= are the extraction code. What blocks you is Baidu itself: the download wants an account, and the account wants a mainland Chinese phone number.

Three routes, honestly rated:

1. Register a Baidu account. Difficult from abroad (+86 number), and then throttled to roughly 50–70 KB/s on the free tier, which is per account — extra threads do not help. A 40GB lab folder at that rate is measured in days.
2. An open-source client plus your own SVIP subscription. Fastest self-hosted option, ~¥30/month, and you still need the account.
3. Have it fetched. Full disclosure, this is us: BaiduFast keeps a premium account, pulls the file and hands you an ordinary HTTPS link. Paste the link with the ?pwd= part included, see the real size and price before paying, download with a browser, IDM or aria2. Links up to 150MB are free, 3 a day. Above that a 40GB folder is $4.80 — per-GB it would be $19.90, but every size sits under a cap ($4.80 up to 50GB). Folders come back as one ZIP with the structure intact.

Nobody in that list needs your Baidu password. If a tool asks for one, walk away.

There is a longer write-up of the same problem for enterprise ISOs in how to download sysin.org files without a Baidu account.

Before you boot a mirrored image

A firewall image from an unknown mirror is the least appropriate thing to run casually. Some basic hygiene:

• Check the hash. Most Chinese blogs publish SHA-256 next to the link. Where the vendor still publishes a number for that build, compare against the vendor's, not the mirror's — a mirror can publish the hash of whatever it is serving.
• Isolate the lab. No management interface on your production VLAN, no shared credentials, no company VPN inside the lab segment. This is good practice even with vendor images and non-negotiable with mirrored ones.
• Expect the licence wall anyway. Getting a PAN-OS qcow2 does not get you a licence. It boots, you can configure it, and features that phone home will not work. If the plan is to pass an exam, that is usually enough; if the plan is to protect real traffic, buy it.
• A mirrored image is for learning. Running unlicensed vendor software in production is a different thing entirely, and it is your neck, not the mirror's.

FAQ

Is there any free PAN-OS for a home lab? Not from Palo Alto. VM-Series images require an entitlement on your support account. Some training providers include timed lab access with a course, which is the legitimate route.

Can I pass PCNSE with FortiGate-VM instead? No — different vendor, different exam. But the free Check Point and FortiGate tiers are excellent for learning firewall concepts generally, and both are free, which PAN-OS is not.

What is 提取码? The 4-character extraction code on a Baidu share, separate from any account. It is usually in the URL as ?pwd=xxxx and repeated in text underneath. Without it the share cannot be opened by anyone.

The Baidu link is dead. Then it is dead for everyone, including any service. Check whether the blog reposted it. You can test any link for free with our Baidu link checker.

Why is my Baidu download 70 KB/s on a gigabit line? The throttle is on the account, not your connection. Measurements in why is Baidu Pan so slow.

Do you handle 40GB folders with hundreds of files? Yes, and the price is capped by size — see pricing. Size is measured and shown before you pay, so a big folder cannot surprise you.

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Only download and run software you have the right to. We are a technical bridge: we fetch what is behind a link you already have. Rights holders can reach us on the DMCA page.

Written September 2026. Free tiers change — if something here goes stale, tell us in the Telegram group and we will fix it.