Version française disponible ici.

Everyone involved in security has ever heard something about the Cisco PIX Firewall.
During testing, I decided to open one, just for fun. Here’s the inside of the dark box.

First impression: just looks like any 19″ rackmount device:

As we can see, it has a floppy drive, which looks unusual for a Cisco device. I was used to find PC Card memory card on Cisco devices, but it wasn’t the case here. Newer models have a flash memory that replaced this floppy drive and are compliant to Cisco’s devices design.

Front view:

Serial (for administration) and failover connectors:

External slots:

Rear view:

Inside the PIX:

My home rackmount PC looks almost the same…

RAM and CPU:

Intel Pentium II processor, SDRAM and standard motherboard.

ISA Card:

Thanks to Antony T. Curtis for the contribution:
The ISA card inside the PIX firewall is a EEPROM card which stores the actual PIX firmware. The normal PC BIOS would run the code on this card at completion of the boot process. It is quite easy to make one of these ISA cards yourself if you want to make a dedicated function device.
Of course, on modern PCs with only PCI bus, it is a bit more tricky because you cannot so easily use cheap logic TTL chips you can buy at your local Radio Shack.

NIC Card:

Intel EtherExpress Pro/100+