Cisco Components, Memory

Cisco PIX (Private Internet EXchange) is a firewall originally conceived in March 1994 by John Mayes of Redwood City, California. more...

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The design, implementation and testing was carried out in 1994 by John Mayes, Brantley Coile¹ and Johnson Wu of Network Translation, Inc. Beta testing was completed and first customer acceptance was on December 21, 1994 at KLA Instruments in San Jose, California. The PIX was awarded the Data Communications Magazine "Hot Product of the Year" award of 1994.

Cisco Systems currently sells the PIX Firewall and continues its development. For a period of approximately three years, starting with 1997, the PIX was sold alongside Cisco's Windows NT-based softwall firewall, the Centri firewall, which was acquired from Global Internet Software Group. The PIX runs a custom-written proprietary operating system originally called Finesse (Fast InterNEt Server Executive), but now the software is known simply as PIX OS. It is classified as a network layer firewall with stateful inspection, although technically the PIX would more precisely be called a Layer 4, or Transport Layer Firewall, as its access is not restricted to Network Layer routing, but socket based connections (A port and an IP Address - Port communications occur at Layer 4). By design it allows internal connections out (outbound traffic), and only allows inbound traffic that is a response to a valid request or is allowed by an ACL (Access Control List) or a conduit. The PIX can be configured to perform many functions including NAT (network address translation) and PAT (port address translation) as well as serving as a VPN (Virtual Private Network) endpoint appliance.

The PIX is constructed using Intel-based/Intel-compatible motherboards. Nearly all PIXes use NIC's with Intel network chipsets, but some older models are occasionally found with 3COM 3c590 and 3c595 cards. The PIX 520 shares basic components, such as motherboard, chassis, NIC's, flash cards, etc, with the Cisco LocalDirector 416/420/430 and the Cisco Service Selector Gateway 6510 (SSG-6510), though each runs a different operating system. The PIX boots off of a proprietary ISA flash memory daughtercard in the case of the PIX Classic, 10000, 510, 520, and 535, and it boots off of integrated flash memory in the case of the PIX 501, 506/506e, 515/515e, 525, and WS-SVC-FWM-1-K9.

Due to the standard nature of the PIX's components, it is technically feasible to construct a "frankenpix" from older computer parts that use the Intel 440EX/LX/BX, 82557/8/9, and 82542/3 chipsets, such as motherboards and network cards, although installing an unlicensed copy of the PIX OS would be legally questionable. The only nonstandard part involved is the ISA flash card, from which the machine boots. Such cards may be acquired from people upgrading their PIX to a newer OS, as the newer PIX OS images won't fit on the 512 kB or 2 MB flash cards found in the PIX Classic, PIX 10000, PIX 510, and PIX 520; except for the 501 and 506, which have 8 MB of flash, one must have at least 16 MB of flash to run versions 5.2 on up.

Read more at Wikipedia.org