Re: Inside PIX?

[Eric Vyncke <evyncke () cisco com>]

Comments in-line...

At 15:26 14/05/98 +0000, ark () eltex spb ru wrote:
> 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..

It is a PC motherboard with some piece removed/not installed (e.g.
the PIX does not need VGA, IDE, SCSI, keyboard, ... controllers --
just a fast PCI). The boot PROM is of course not the plain BIOS ;-)

> 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)

As Perry and others mentionned it, the PIX software is running on
a micro kernel called Finesse. The PIX comes from the acquisition
of a company called NTI (I think in late '95).

The PIX software is not IOS based (mainly -- I guess-- because the
microkernels are different), but, the command line interface has
been modified to look like the IOS one ;-)

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

<HUMOUR> I would prefer to get my MS-Word, Eudora, ... running
on IOS for stability sake </HUMOUR>

Hope this helps

-eric

Eric Vyncke      
Technical Consultant               Cisco Systems Belgium SA/NV
Phone:  +32-2-778.4677             Fax:    +32-2-778.4300
E-mail: evyncke () cisco com          Mobile: +32-75-312.458