RE: Inside PIX?

["Andrew J. Luca" <andrew.luca () mediaone net>]

I believe that this product came from a company called PIX in the first
place.  When Cisco takes and IOS-ifies an acquired box, they often just
change the commands to look more like the traditional IOS commands as
possible.  Look at the LightStream, Crescendo, Grand Junction, (the list
goes on) devices just to get an idea of this.  I don't think that what is in
the box matters.  Just how it does it's job.  Cisco has been pushing - just
as other manufacturers have - away from proprietary architectures as
possible.  They even released a router platform about eighteen months ago
which uses a PCI based bus for interface cards (7200 platform).

Just my opinion - I don't work for Cisco.

Drew

-----Original Message-----
From:   owner-firewall-wizards () nfr net [mailto:owner-firewall-wizards () nfr net]
On Behalf Of ark () eltex spb ru
Sent:   Thursday, May 14, 1998 11:27 AM
To:     firewall-wizards () nfr net
Subject:        Inside PIX?

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

nuqneH,

There was a posting in relcom.comp.security some days ago: one man
told he opened the PIX box and guess what was inside? Yep, you are
right. The generic chinese PC motherboard with Pentium CPU.
Not just some Pentium-based piece of hardware, but _PC_ motherboard.
IDE controller and some other things were removed but..

Then, did anybody try to take a closer look on the software?
I guess (if the assumption that PIX software is an IOS derivative is
right) porting IOS to the PC was not as hard as one might think
(assuming that IOS was really written in gcc as rumors say): not easy
but not harder than porting from one cisco hardware platform to another
(some ciscos are (were) actually a m68k-based _computer_ with nearly
no tricky hardware things implemented and others have nearly nothing
common with first ones)

..i am just curious. It would be funny to see IOS running on PC ;)

                                     _     _  _  _  _      _  _
 {::} {::} {::}  CU in Hell          _| o |_ | | _|| |   / _||_|   |_ |_ |_
 (##) (##) (##)        /Arkan#iD    |_  o  _||_| _||_| /   _|  | o |_||_||_|
 [||] [||] [||]            Do i believe in Bible? Hell,man,i've seen one!

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: 2.6.3i
Charset: noconv

iQCVAwUBNVsNN6H/mIJW9LeBAQFXRgP/fNZCvuAmiXel5g+9L7RgEoQJFqHwmRex
pmePvU1Q6vxhFukINrV84adCrGxi51FPsPvI4gRgUTeybcYO6BdfhHW2bqUw8zRF
x04x7JE0DAkQ9z7fm5GZTeJaDJ4gt3YWT+0cKn9HHZy5GIMqMgzcFreC59ozj3Yi
8cBGDVdnBdo=
=8mXG
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----