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I ended up finding out a lot about the older Cisco Firewalls by weeding through Cisco's site. What we have is called a Cisco "Classic" PIX Firewall. Any PIX units with a serial # under 06002015 are under the "Classic" catagory. Our system had 8 megs of RAM, a 512k flash card, and a Pentium 133 processor (pretty standard for this type of PIX). Here's some good tips to help you upgrade them.
Cisco claims that you need to buy special RAM for them - this isn't true. The motherboard inside the Classic PIX is a typical Pentium motherboard from around the mid 90's. EDO RAM works fine, and the rule is the same as on any PC - it must be in pairs, and make sure it's quality RAM if you want stability.
The 133 Pentium in ours actually baked itself (the reason this PIX was removed and replaced with a newer unit). The heatsink clapped on the processor from Cisco is TERRIBLE! It's very small, and not something I'd put on a chip running faster than 75MHz. If you have a classic PIX and it's starting to get a lot of use, I would strongly recommend you replace the cisco heatsink with a modern-day socket 7 fan - more than enough for cooling under the heaviest loads.
The best operating system binary that you can load on the Classic PIX is 4.1(6). The Flash, remember, has only 512k of RAM, so anything newer just doesn't fit. The flash card doesn't take any old RAM, so it's not upgradable. A newer one can be purchased from Cisco, BUT, that's what 90% of the cost of a Cisco Firwall is, so it's probably not worth it.
One interesting upgrade test remains... we ordered an Evergreen Socket 7 Overdrive processor (an AMD K6-2 400 on a voltage and clock multiplier board that fits into any Socket 5 or Socket 7 system). Overdrives of this nature work on just about any PC, so we are going to try it out on the Classic PIX. If it works, it will make the old PIX faster than Cisco's newest PIX series, which run at 233Mhz. If not... well, it was worth a try! I'll post later to let everyone know if it was sucessful or not.
Hope everyone finds this handy! [sig][/sig]
Cisco claims that you need to buy special RAM for them - this isn't true. The motherboard inside the Classic PIX is a typical Pentium motherboard from around the mid 90's. EDO RAM works fine, and the rule is the same as on any PC - it must be in pairs, and make sure it's quality RAM if you want stability.
The 133 Pentium in ours actually baked itself (the reason this PIX was removed and replaced with a newer unit). The heatsink clapped on the processor from Cisco is TERRIBLE! It's very small, and not something I'd put on a chip running faster than 75MHz. If you have a classic PIX and it's starting to get a lot of use, I would strongly recommend you replace the cisco heatsink with a modern-day socket 7 fan - more than enough for cooling under the heaviest loads.
The best operating system binary that you can load on the Classic PIX is 4.1(6). The Flash, remember, has only 512k of RAM, so anything newer just doesn't fit. The flash card doesn't take any old RAM, so it's not upgradable. A newer one can be purchased from Cisco, BUT, that's what 90% of the cost of a Cisco Firwall is, so it's probably not worth it.
One interesting upgrade test remains... we ordered an Evergreen Socket 7 Overdrive processor (an AMD K6-2 400 on a voltage and clock multiplier board that fits into any Socket 5 or Socket 7 system). Overdrives of this nature work on just about any PC, so we are going to try it out on the Classic PIX. If it works, it will make the old PIX faster than Cisco's newest PIX series, which run at 233Mhz. If not... well, it was worth a try! I'll post later to let everyone know if it was sucessful or not.
Hope everyone finds this handy! [sig][/sig]
