Re: Disecting the Cisco PIX

[Evan Wagner <ewagner () Radix Net>]

Yes,

A PIX 520 consists of an Intel Seattle II motherboard, power supply, floppy
drive, proprietary Cisco ISA flash card and 2 or more Intel Pro 100 PCI
NICs. That's all the components needed to create a 'FrankenPIX'. There was
a thread on Usenet about this a while back...

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&threadm=a7vc0q%248kb%241%40sunsite.icm.edu.pl&rnum=1&prev=/groups%3Fhl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26q%3Dfrankenpix%26btnG%3DGoogle%2BSearch

PIX classics may have used 10MB NICs but not the 520's that I am aware of.

--Evan

On 30 Jul 2002, Art Mason wrote:

> Out of curiosity, has anyone here ever cracked open any of the Cisco PIX
> series firewalls chassis?  From what I've gathered by reading up on
> their product information and by what people have said about them in
> various mailing lists and newsgroups,  they are actually built on an x86
> hardware platform w/ a Celeron 300MHz (PIX 506E) to Pentium III 1.0GHz
> (PIX 535) CPU and anywhere from 32MB to 1GB RAM .  I understand the
> storage media to be compact flash (4-16MB capacity) and on the low-end
> models w/ 10Mb throughput, they actually use an ISA NIC in the chassis.
> I've also read that the PIX doesn't support local logging (everything
> needs to be redirected to a syslog server).  Can anyone confirm any of
> this?  If so, why couldn't one just throw OpenBSD onto some flash media,
> drop a couple of Intel Pro100+ dual-port NICs in a 2U rackmount case,
> maybe offload some of the VPN stuff onto an ASIC-based encryption
> acceleration card, and save some big bucks, granted they know how to set
> up PF from the CLI?  This is just something I've been wondering about
> for a while, and was curious as to what others in the know had to say
> about it.  Thanks in advance.
>
> Art Mason
>
>
>
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