Comments in-line... At 15:26 14/05/98 +0000, arkat_private wrote: >There was a posting in relcom.comp.security some days ago: one man >told he opened the PIX box and guess what was inside? Yep, you are >right. The generic chinese PC motherboard with Pentium CPU. >Not just some Pentium-based piece of hardware, but _PC_ motherboard. >IDE controller and some other things were removed but.. It is a PC motherboard with some piece removed/not installed (e.g. the PIX does not need VGA, IDE, SCSI, keyboard, ... controllers -- just a fast PCI). The boot PROM is of course not the plain BIOS ;-) >Then, did anybody try to take a closer look on the software? >I guess (if the assumption that PIX software is an IOS derivative is >right) porting IOS to the PC was not as hard as one might think >(assuming that IOS was really written in gcc as rumors say): not easy >but not harder than porting from one cisco hardware platform to another >(some ciscos are (were) actually a m68k-based _computer_ with nearly >no tricky hardware things implemented and others have nearly nothing >common with first ones) As Perry and others mentionned it, the PIX software is running on a micro kernel called Finesse. The PIX comes from the acquisition of a company called NTI (I think in late '95). The PIX software is not IOS based (mainly -- I guess-- because the microkernels are different), but, the command line interface has been modified to look like the IOS one ;-) > >..i am just curious. It would be funny to see IOS running on PC ;) <HUMOUR> I would prefer to get my MS-Word, Eudora, ... running on IOS for stability sake </HUMOUR> Hope this helps -eric Eric Vyncke Technical Consultant Cisco Systems Belgium SA/NV Phone: +32-2-778.4677 Fax: +32-2-778.4300 E-mail: evynckeat_private Mobile: +32-75-312.458
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Apr 13 2001 - 12:59:26 PDT