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Build a Cisco PIX for 800 Australian Dollars
tallguy_wt writes: "Why fork out thousands of dollars to learn Cisco's PIX firewalling product when you can build your own for under 800 Australian Dollars, as shown in this article by Routermonkey."
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Why fork out thousands of dollars to learn Cisco's PIX firewalling product when you can build your own for under 800 Australian Dollars?
Because it is illegal and you will go to jail for stealing CISCO's intellectual property.
Well, one reason why I buy Cisco is for the maintenance agreements, the support packs and the like you know all the expensive stuff that gives me peace of mind. When that firewall blows, who's neck is on the line?
Oh and the fact that the entire Cisco site runs on MySQL should be enough reason to give them all your employers hard earnt money
How much better is Cisco than the same system running Linux or *BSD?
According to the Universal Currency Convertor, AU$800 is about US$443.
"All art is quite useless." -- Oscar Wilde
...posting links to a story which encourages you sourcing stuff from a warez site ?
Gentlemen, start your penguins
If you want to build your own one, you could as well do the same using things available under open source so that visitors from Cisco do not have to call Yevgeni and Boris to teach beat you up. ;)
Well, I can understand that learning the PIX in detail might be a good and interesting reason to build it up, instead of spending $15 000 or more in it.
ACTON, Mass.--August 30, 2002--OSDN today announced it has rethought it's company direction and expanded into the lucrative market of publically breaking the DMCA. "Cisco can't do shyat," cited Slashdot General Manager CmdrTaco, "We give props to our box0r hacking homeys" OSDN stock rose to a 2 cent high on the pinksheets following the announcement.
s200.org - visit it (me), love it (me).
Within 1 hour.
Microsoft - Where would you like to go today, Maybe Jail?
yea you could call it a troll, but i have to say this isnt really like slashdot.
Posting a warez link on front pafe
A couple of days back you posted a zip file for crashing windows
What the routermonkey guy is suggestiong will definately land you up in jail no joking here.
Currently slashdot is kind justyfying priracy and stealing in names of rights and all bull shit.
This is not done. Free software and open source DO NOT EQUATE with piracy.
Slashdot is the domain of geeks, technologists who are sensible people and do not want warez and cracks.
If I wanted warez and cracks i would go to some warez site and get plenty.
And in case you are not really convinced, lemme tell ya.. getting hold of flash for cisco is illegal. "Difficult to procure" thats what the article says. Well its plain illegal. So atleast post a warning about this so that some poor dumb ass dosent really try this and land up in jail.
And could you please aviod such things in future?
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
Well, I think it's good to do some hardware hacking, like TiVo modding and whatnot.
Using opensource software instead of using their expensive counterparts is also a nice thing to do.
But, excuse me, what is this fucking thing about?
This puts the whole community into a bad light.
This whole "hack" or "tutorial" or whatever you might call it is nothing but two things:
Take some standart hardware and install stolen software. Wow.
Would you call this an intelligent hack? Maybe the folks over at something like scriptslashkiddiedot.org would...
Go to www.freesco.org or any other single floppy OSS based distro, get an old pc and two NIC's and go. $100 max.
The reason to use CISCO is ultimate durability, stability, service, configurability, speed etc etc.
hacking this thing together is gonna give none of the above!
In what setting am i gonna need a cheap ripoff of a professional router?
Those places that need the real thing usualy also deserve the real thing !
Why are other peoples sig's always more witty ???
Linux iptables HOWTO
How to Build a FreeBSD-STABLE Firewall with IPFILTER
The OpenBSD Packet Filter HOWTO
Acts@core.mailboks.com Acrux@core.mailboks.com Adam@core.mailboks.com Adar@core.mailboks.com Ada@core.mailboks.com
Would it be fair use if you build these beast to store your backup of PIX OS on? It could be considered a very advanced backup medium, with a built-in functionality test ;)
karma capped
Thanks to this insightful article, I've realised the true money-saving potenial of stealing.
One of the arguments I have heard for choosing PIX is that it is a "hardware firewall" and therefore presumably more reliable, faster, and less likely to break. Perhaps this will make more people realize that the PIX is just a piece of software running on a PC -- just like almost all other firewalls in the market.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Everybody in the Cisco gig knows that the PIXs are nothing more than basic PCs, complete with floppy drive for software upgrades, this really is no revelation.
This guy just comes across as some network wanna be. Learning the commands is the simple bit, RTFM, (or just reverse normal IOS commands for a PIX) know when to use these commands and exactly what they do and how this will affect the enterprise is the bit that makes you CCIE material.
No doubt Cisco will get there own back when he does the CCIE lab.
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security
For all the column inches devoted to how the DMCA/RIAA/whoever is immoral, you go and put a link to someone advocating theft. This isn't far from advertising warez... even if the server can handle the traffic, the slashdot effect still allows a lot of eyeballs to see that site.
I disagree with software piracy, and stealing music online; I occasionally do download MP3s, I won't deny it; just as I drank alcohol when I was under 18 (UK), but I would consider myself only a 'minor' user - these files are never on my HDD for too long (I think the record is about a week)
But this is qualitatively and quantatively very different from
How can any movement to safeguard our rights be taken seriously with this sort of lunacy? Valenti et al will be rubbing their hands in glee. This is another victory for them - if one of the most popular advocates of free software is advertising piracy, then that reflects very badly on the community as a whole.
And yes, I do consider my MP3 use to be wrong - I'll buy these songs if they release the single but I don't want an album of pricey crap because there's one song ion it I like - I can't wait for services where a comprehensive list of songs can be bought at a reasonable pprice, individually...
This idea was invented by Shampoo.
The last Cisco PIX I had to open to install a new NIC was a model 1500 IIRC, and it was just a low-end PC board (Intel BX) with a P166 and 32 or 64 Mb o Ram. And a PCMCIA card slot. This handled a T1 with about 1,000 users and had no downtime in over 5 years. The Cisco software was excellent.
There is nothing stopping anyone from downloading a image from Cisco's site if they so choose. Licencing is another matter. That would be against the law if I read the Cisco licence correctly.
This story does not link to a source for the files mentioned. That does not make this story OK. It is not OK that routermonkey has the filenames listed, as that makes it trivial to find using P2P networks.
That being said, you could just goto Cisco's web site and read up on their PIX products and read the docs to "learn how to configure it". But why, if the like Freesco, The LRP, and BSD are around. These will do anything the PIX can do and are quite simalar to the Cisco product. The reason the most businesses want a Cisco firewall is that the CFO/CIO don't want to get nailed by auditors for running a "freeware" firewall. They want a big name to cover their asses. The Freesco/BSD/IPtables combos will do just fine for your educational purposes.
I may be bad with names, but I'll never forget your IP address
Details on how to do this surfaced on some cisco study boards 12-18 months ago. Most of the people on the board were interested in this to be able to add a Pix to thier home study lab. Groupstudy had a very long thread on this. They were dubbed the 'FrankenPix'
Cisco is very well represented on the board, and they never said a word to anybody about not doing this, and sort of allowed it to happen.
On the other hand, when FrankenPix's started appearing on eBay, they cracked down, hard and quick. But, to this day, they still haven't said anything during the discussions o the cisco study boards.
My view on this is they really don't care if people build FrankenPix's for home study, after all, that's just going to help sell more Pix in the long run. (Checkpoint, afterall, will gladly give you 30-day trail licenses for FireWall-1 for home study) But, if you try to build and sell these, they WILL get you. (And honestly, if you want to use these boxes in a professional enviorment for day-to-day usage, you are asking for trouble.)
--dirt
I guess there is a lot of people who have been playing with ipfw, iptables, ipchains etc
And would realy, sincerely, like to know:
What can I do with a Cisco PIX that I can't do with Linux and IPTables ?
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
I recommend avoiding smoothwall (search usenet for "richard morrell smoothwall" for more info..).
Try IPCOP for a GPL fork of smoothwall that is not a hidden attempt at selling things and is GPL in spirit, not just name.
This article shouldnt have been how to make a pix it should be how to make a legal,cheap,open source alternative to one.
no sig.
I see a lot of "stealing" comments. So, instead, go the Open Source route and build your own firewall with the NetBSD/i386 Firewall Project
Yes, yes, I know, blatant plug
-John
Look, there's plenty of reasons why a company would want to purchase a PIX from Cisco. Many have been outlined in postings already
A student wishing to practice configuring a PIX would benefit greatly from this information. They obviously wouldn't be able to afford a full PIX, so putting together a test box is their only choice.
As far as I'm concerned, this info can only benefit Cisco, as they get a whole bunch of people that know their product inside out. That then tips over into increased sales, as these people recommend using a PIX to their boss.
DeeK
NetBSD/i386 Firewall Project
-John
Well, first yesterday they provided a direct link to a tool to DOS a Windows NT/2000/XP box, and today they're linking to an article on how to build a Cisco PIX and steal their software to run on it?? WTF is Slashdot becoming? If you are just downloading the PIX software you *are* stealing it. It's several thousand dollars.
As stated before, this "hack" is piracy and therefore illegal. Furthermore it is a stupid waste of money.
Why spend $800 for a amateurish, rigged up, pirated Pix when you can have the real thing for less. If what you really want is to learn about the Pix and its configuration simply hop on to eBay and buy the real thing. On eBay Pix 501s and 520s can be had for $400 and $500 respectively.
This has been mentioned above, but not very clearly. As far as I know, the PIX software also requires an activation key, which costs money. You might be able to get one from a warez utility, but it is an extra step, and it is illegal. Also note that Cisco charges extra for the ability to just secure shell into your firewall(!). Unless you cough up a whole bunch of extra money, you have to use TELNET to configure a FIREWALL. This is really lame.
/proc filesystem. I searched and searched and could NOT find any way to do this on BSD. It may exist, but I couldn't find it.
Further, the PIX just isn't a very good firewall.
The hardware is well-built but incredibly underpowered. The one we have at work is only 200mhz. I don't know how far that will scale, but, personally, I don't think I'd want to be putting more than about 5 megabits through it. And Cisco charges about 12,000 dollars for the PIX.(!)
The command syntax is really hard to figure out. It just makes no sense at all. The documentation on Cisco's site is excellent, but I always have to resort to cookbook examples, because I don't use it every day.
The default configuration is 'allow all outbound traffic and all inbound replies'. It is very hard to change this. If you want a fairly secure network, you shouldn't allow direct outbound connections, but rather only through a proxy device of some kind. If your security policy requires outbound connection restrictions, this is really awkward to implement with the PIX.
The PIX isn't a very good router, either. It doesn't support most of the 'real' IOS commands. You can do some routing with it, but it's not very flexible.
I've worked with a lot of firewalls and have done a lot of firewalling, and in my opinion, Linux with iptables is about the best thing going. You will have to spend significant learning time to figure it out, as the documentation is not very good, but once you do, you can do pretty much anything with it. Linux has always been a great router, and with the introduction of iptables, became a great firewall too. If you don't want to build rules by hand, there's a program called 'fwbuilder' that gives you a Checkpoint-like GUI. FWBuilder also speaks OpenBSD's pf and I *think* Checkpoint's firewall language, but I'm not sure about that last.
OpenBSD has a good reputation as a firewall. I used it at home for a couple years, but I have moved to Linux since then. The PF language is very clean and easy to read, and if you're just starting with firewalling, it can be a good first opensource firewall. However, there were big performance problems with OpenBSD's bridging firewall code in 3.0; it choked hard over about 25K connections, and past about 30 megabits it just froze up for random periods of time. Very frustrating. Linux on the same hardware (with the iptables bridging patch) handles over 60 megabits flawlessly. And going over 30k connections is trivial; you simply echo a large number into a variable in the
They may have fixed the performance problems in more recent revs of OpenBSD. 3.0 was the first release of pf, and I threw it into a monster production environment based on the OpenBSD team's reputation. The later revs may be much better, but as of 3.0, Linux absolutely destroys OpenBSD as a firewall.
There's one cool thing the PIX does that I haven't figured out how to duplicate manually. It has an 'established' command, which allows you to say: "If I open a command on port X, allow a return connection on port Y for a short period of time." This is useful, for example, for IRC, where you connect on port 6667 and an ident connection comes back in on port 113.
I asked about this feature on the OpenBSD newsgroups, and got scoffed at... according to them, it's more secure to leave the port open all the time to everyone than just to allow return connections from a host to which you have connected and only for a short period of time. Frankly, I think that's just stupid. It's the typical apologist reaction... "that's a dumb feature to ask for because it's hard to do". They'll say it's stupid until someone takes the time to implement it, and then suddenly that's the only way to go and any system that doesn't do that is obviously broken.
I haven't found that capability in the Linux iptables stuff either, FWIW. As far as I know, only the PIX does this, and I consider it a very useful feature. (you can sort of simulate it with some of the kernel modules for different protocols, but I haven't found a way to do an arbitrary set of ports).
If you can live without the 'established' command, though, I'd probably, overall, recommend the Linux/FWBuilder combo. If you want to learn more about firewalling, OpenBSD's pf language is a nice simple way to start.
And if you really want to spend money on a firewall, Checkpoint is a much better solution than the PIX. It has many enterprise-class features that the free alternatives lack, like good VPN support and great support for managing clusters of firewalls. The Nokia Checkpoint boxes are *really* cool; they are based on a custom BSD-derived kernel. They cost more than the PIX, but in my opinion are wildly better and well worth the extra. (when I last looked, the prices on the Nokia boxes were in the 20K+ range. They may have dropped since the dotcom blowup.) The administration is easy, you get the power of BSD, and the hardware is really well-built. Very, very cool boxes.
I work at Cisco, things are tough right now. The company is making money but did you know that they haven't given raises to their employees in two years? Did you know that plan on going at least one more before they give out a raise?
Did you know that they have cut promotions to 3% per year? I'll do that math for you. As a Cisco employee you can expect a promotion every 33 years. Not that it matters because if you do get promoted all you get are stock options with no raise.
Did you know that they have their "active management" guns blaring at full speed? This means that the managers are forced to cut 5% of their staff every quarter. (In fairness, they seem to actually cut less than that). However, they have certainly reduced their staff by over 20% in the past two years. There aren't any slackers left at the company.
Thank you for handing out information regarding how to steal our products.
Vanguard
--------------------
I understand that some of have it even worse. Some of you are not employed at all. I feel for you.
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
From the EULA before you can download the images on CCO:
License. License. Subject to the terms and conditions of and except as otherwise provided in this Agreement, Cisco Systems, Inc. or the Cisco Systems, Inc. subsidiary licensing the Software, if sale is not directly by Cisco Systems, Inc. ("Cisco"), and its suppliers grant to Customer ("Customer") a nonexclusive and nontransferable license to use the specific Cisco program modules, feature set(s) or feature(s) for which Customer has paid the required license fees (the "Software"), in object code form only. In addition, the foregoing license shall also be subject to the following limitations, as applicable:
* Unless otherwise expressly provided in the documentation, Customer shall use the Software solely as embedded in, for execution on, or (where the applicable documentation permits installation on non-Cisco equipment) for communication with Cisco equipment owned or leased by Customer;
*snip* And this:
General Limitations. Except as otherwise expressly provided under this Agreement, Customer shall have no right, and Customer specifically agrees not to:
(i) transfer, assign or sublicense its license rights to any other person, or use the Software on unauthorized or secondhand Cisco equipment, and any such attempted transfer, assignment or sublicense shall be void;
I understand you may think you are exempt from EULAs because you don't want to pay for something, but the company's lawyers might see it a different way. Using any of those images on non-Cisco hardware is prohibited. Period.
I own a PIX 506 box and have worked on the 515 and 525 as well.
Both the PIX 506 and 515 use an Intel socket 7 200Mhz MMX processor without a cooling fan, they just have a heat sink. The system board is just an Intel, nothing special there. PIX expansion slots are PCI slots. The Ethernet interfaces use Intel eepro i82557 (or was it i82559?) chips, just like your Intel NIC in your desktop. Everything is really standard, except for the software that runs on the box.
For people who know Cisco hardware, they seem to recognize that the PIX series of firewalls are far faster than say a 3600 series router, or any of the older Cisco hardware. The PIX firewalls were acquired by Cisco when they bought Network Translation. Reference;
http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/146/
So when you are buying that $4000 3640 with 128MB of RAM to handle the 100K or so of Internet BGP routes, you are buying something with the processing power of an Pentium computer or less.
Here are some facts on the Cisco 3600 series;
3620 64MB RAM maximum, 80Mhz RISC processor
3640 128MB RAM maximum, 100Mhz RISC processor
3660 256MB RAM maximum, 225Mhz RISC processor
One of the major considerations for Cisco is that their equipment has to be really stable and heat tolerant. People love to treat Cisco hardware like old telco hardware and keep it out in a barn and stuff, in the damp air, with a bunch of dust, whatever. We should all know how Intel processors are in regards to heat. But even an old 200Mhz Intel MMX processor can run without a cooling fan.
Cisco router hardware, in general, is really slow and sucks for processor speed. Juniper has mopped Cisco all over the floor in the core Internet market in the last few years because of port density, processing speed, and packet forwarding latency. In comparison, you look at a Juniper M40 versus a Cisco 12012, and the 12012 looks like a huge POS, and I don't mean packet over Sonet.
One of the things about the Juniper routers is that they use Intel processors and SDRAM -- not much special there. The hardware is all completely custom, but they choose to ditch the Motorola and IBM processors for Intel. Packet forwarding processors are totally different than the core processors that we are talking about here, so I will leave them out for the most part. Still, Cisco uses a lot of off the shelf stuff in their routers and companies like Juniper have manufactured their own or applied existing stuff better to get the wire speed forwarding rates on all interfaces, with a backplane speed that is greater than the sum of all possible interfaces on a router.
Cisco does not really see themselves as a hardware manufacture, but instead as a software company. However, if they do not shape up and start making some really good hardware, they are going to get kicked out by Juniper as they start to climb down the ladder and come out with smaller more affordable boxes and spread out from their core and big-box offerings (think M-5).
Lately Cisco has released a few good new hardware. The 10000 series aggregation boxes can mux Sonet down to fractional DS1s, which is pretty hot, but these boxes are really hard to use these days because of the serious downturn in the market and the fact that a lot of DS1 customers have gone away. Old 7513s that ISPs have in stock with fractional PA-2T3s work fine.
In switches, Cisco has come out with the 3500XL and 3550XL switches, which are really great.
But most people out there have 2600s and 3600s. There are a lot of 2500s still in use too. Some things are starting to hurt Cisco though. It can take a minute or two for all of those BGP routes to get filtered out when interfaces flap. Cisco does not even offer any kind of SSH2 capability with ANY of their routers (to my knowledge), they only support SSH1 on special IOS versions and platforms. I really wonder if these routers, with their slow processors, can handle new stuff.
I wonder how this will effect an IP6 roll out. I remember working on some 3600s and IP6 some time back. They had issues, but I understand that Cisco has worked a lot of those out.
Oh well.
The moral of the story is that Cisco hardware is kind of slow and it shows. On the other hand, it usually gets the job done.
I need to go back to finding myself a job. Posting on Slashdot ain't paying the rent.
Anyone out there have a Juniper Olive image? I would not mind having one of those in my lab.