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Inside a PIX Firewall

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

First look: hmmmm... it looks like a standard 19" network device.

PIX Firewall Picture

device. But as we can see, this friendly device has a floppy drive, which looks unusual for a Cisco device. I was used to find PC Card memory card, but not on this one. Newer models have a flash memory that replaced this floppy drive and has the Cisco design.
PIX Firewall from front Front view
2 serial ports for PIX Serial and failover connectors
2 NIC Cards inside The slots: don't confuse Input and Output Interfaces
PIX's back
 Rear view
Inside a PIX Inside the box
Closer inside view:
Intel Inside ;-) CPU and RAM. Intel Pentium II processor and standard motherboard
The cards inside :
ISA Card photo

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 Picture Intel EtherExpress Pro/100+

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