Cisco PIX Device Manager: Enterprise GUIs Episode 1

[@kunarnav1985]

It was written in the manual that use a known bad hp ddr1 ram stick to open the cover up -Clabretro 2024 and Cisco 2000's

[@jfbeam]

Those little copper ears are indeed for grounding. Because it's not _actually_ metal-on-metal, there's a gap, and RF can leak through it. But it's not enough of a gap for the spongy mesh stuff. If I hadn't put things through UL and FCC testing, I'd question those things too. There's a lot of unusual things done to get those certification logos.

[@clabretro]

makes sense!

[@nickwallette6201]

Yep. It’s basically a spring to increase surface contact.

[@JZB-2022]

When I started my job as network engineer, I was given a Cisco style console cable that went straight to USB-C instead of the usual DB-9. Super Handy

[@clabretro]

yeah I need to get one of those lol

[@jirehla-ab1671]

For u, How hard is it to find archaic software?​@@clabretro

[@JoshLiechty]

Those are fantastic, I love that they work on not just Cisco but also Arista, Juniper, Mikrotik, etc. Unfortunately, some manufacturers had to be different and invent their own pinout (*cough*Ciena*cough*)... but overall, those cables are invaluable.

[@rnts08]

Kids these days don't even remember how we had to chain different console cables with serial to USB converters to be able to manage our ultra expensive network hardware.

[@dapullia]

I can confirm that copy and paste of saved configuration script text files to a serial terminal is exactly how you would manage this generation of Cisco equipment. I studied CCNA back in high school and we worked on this generation of equipment in our lab environment. You would have all of your configs saved to text files in case you had the “Oh !” moment. I remember a passing requirement for the course was that you had to troubleshoot and bring up an entire 5 router network correctly. You had exactly 5 minutes to repair the entire company’s network or you’re fired for the purposes of the test. A second test was that we had to bring up a Cisco router of this generation from nothing to fully configured for memory without saved config files by hand in less than 3 minutes and yes it was a class performance standard. You would have to learn all of the short commands. Most of them can be shortened to 2 to 3 characters. Good memories but it’s been 25ish years since then for me and I ended up going into application development myself instead of networking.

[@nickwallette6201]

I would say it’s mixed. I did a lot back then direct on the CLI. But because some Cisco devices didn’t even have the crudest of editing facilities for lists like ACLs, you were forced to drop the entire thing and recreate it with your edits in place. And since every change was live the moment you pressed Enter, the gap between dropping the ACL and having it fully replaced needed to be minimal. So, pasting it was the way to go - not to even mention the reduced likelihood of typos and other errors. (Granted, a workaround was to use two ACLs, and update the pointer to one or the other as you make changes. Then at least you’re never half-implemented. Still just goes to show how primitive the CLI was back then.)

[@dapullia]

@@nickwallette6201 Granted that you used what tools you had. In our case, on the hardware we had, it i did not even have any GUI or web based admin interfaces which was kind of by design so you learned it the hard way first. We never saw anything but CLI.

[@cromulence]

I got into old Macs a little while ago and my mind was blown by the fact that Apple had a 'gigabit ethernet' model of G4 Mac shipping in July 2000. It's built into the main logic board too so you don't lose a PCI slot. The gigabit chip gets toasty and has a heatsink on it - makes me chuckle when you think how pedestrian gigabit controllers are now.

[@zacheslick]

Especially since they still won’t put gigabit Ethernet on smart TVs

[@cromulence]

@@zacheslick but think of the 25¢ they saved!

[@tech34756]

​@@zacheslickCould be worse, this morning I saw at my retail job a WiFi mesh kit which only had Fast Ethernet. At least a UHDTV can in theory get by with just Fast Ethernet for basic streaming.

[@nickwallette6201]

What’s crazy to me - well, two things: First, that Ethernet grew by orders of magnitude. That’s quite an ambitious leap! But also, 20 years after that G4, Gigabit Ethernet is still the standard. While 10Gb-T exists, it isn’t necessary for most applications, and is kind of pushing it in terms of bandwidth over UTP. Shout out Gig-E.

[@kenmurphy4259]

PDM rocks! I have a little Cisco PIX 501, best little firewall ever! Great Video clabretro, love your channel! ISDN next please

[@clabretro]

ISDN eventually!

[@peppigue]

@@clabretro we got dialup in 94, when i was 14. first 28.8, then isdn - single line i think (128?). only got into tech professionally the last few years, looking forward to learn more about the infrastructure underpinning my mod tracker techno infused trolling of italian irc channels

[@dragonballbw3]

PDM was OK, ASDM was a quantum leap upgrade (PixOS 7.x+)

[@KJ7BZC]

After living in ASDM (which is the very similar equivalent for the newer ASA firewalls) at my work for the past month or so, I must say I love the simplicity of the PIX lol. Great demo, makes me want to get one of these to add to the collection of far EOL'd networking equipment to obsess over...

[@clabretro]

the PIX are really fun to mess around with!

[@JoshsYouTube]

That fan is worth more $ than the PIX. XD I remember these PIX devices, they were dated and slated to be replaced when i started my career.

[@rnts08]

You'd be horrified how many pix and asa devices that are still in production, old firmware and stuck in closets no one knows about. But Martha from accounting needs to connect to the VPN from home.

[@truckerallikatuk]

Those copper things are for EMI reduction. It was a common technique at that time. I have a pile of them from cases.

[@LB4FH]

I love these Sunday morning flashbacks to old Cisco gear. Had a lot of fun setting up both office to office and client VPN's on these 😁

[@Dygear]

*Inhales deeply -- Exhales while saying:* Fuckin' Java.

[@jfbeam]

Yeap. In this era, it was the only way to do it. (short of a native windows application)

[@megan_alnico]

​@@jfbeamYeah I mean...what were the alternatives? Visual basic, Delphi, C++ Builder, just raw Win32 calls?

[@cromulence]

Remember Microsofts Java Virtual Machine debacle? lol. I still have a JVM install CD somewhere.

[@SB-qm5wg]

Having to set special Java permissions for every IP in IE. 😡

[@nickwallette6201]

This guy knows.

[@VK2FVAX]

For a CISCO video.. there was a surprising lack of IBM gear...

[@clabretro]

I know, it's disappointing

[@VK2FVAX]

@@clabretro Not particularly just funny given your comment about Cisco in IBM vids. You'll get around to the gear in time. :)

[@leo_craft1]

Crazy how you can substitute all this with pfsense nowadays

[@juanstdio]

thanks to you, I have a proxmox server with a late 2008 mac.. and some 2000's devices to play with... man I love this channel

[@clabretro]

fantastic!

[@AnonyDave]

Oh dear, pdm. I don't think I ever heard a good word about it when I had to deal with a few pix devices around 2004. Or rather it was so bad, no one ever used it. It was all ssh and *shudder* telnet (but thankfully telnet was rarely used by then). cli management is fine for most network gear, but I definitely find with complex acls and nat rules on a firewall then a gui with a table of all your rules is just soo much easier to look at. edit: as a note, I see you trying to get a gig card working in it. Franken pixes were a thing back then, the software itself only supports a handful of intel chipsets

[@jfbeam]

Anyone with a clue would use the cli, but PDM was not total trash. There are a few things it can do way faster than a person at the keyboard. (VPN wizard for one.) If you check the correct box, it'll show you what it's doing.

[@adampope5107]

For some reason where I work like 95% of devs call ssh telnet. It infuriates me.

[@nickwallette6201]

In 2003, to a PIX, I would’ve still been using telnet some. Remember, Windows was woefully incomplete for IT purposes. No SSH client, no ISO mounting, couldn’t even handle CR/LF/CRLF variants of text files in Notepad. I never actually used PDM, but did my time with ASDM. I hated ASDM, and _to this day_ still run into configs on ASAs that have ASDM Herpes - all those network and service objects with names that end in numbers and mean nothing to anybody because you can’t put a bare IP or port number in an ACL. But yes, ACLs and object references lend themselves to GUIs with as much screen real estate as you can give them. So we needed something. But if I ever again deal with Java runtimes and certificates to get an ASDM login working, it’ll be too soon. Definitely remember discovering that the PIX was just a PC with PCI slots, and as luck would have it, I had an Intel NIC hanging around that did … mostly … work. I remember it had _some_ strange behavior - something benign but annoying. Certainly cheaper. Cisco site-to-site VPN suuuucckkked, and still does, and I can’t fathom why, in 2024, I still run into peers that need a proxy list of A and B side IP or subnet pairings when routed tunnels have been a thing for a long, long time now. A security association for each combination of source and destination networks was dumb then, and dumber today. Thank you Cisco for the recurring paper cut with that Meraki nonsense, which STILL behaves this way, decades past its sell-by date. … I think I might be hate-watching this video. Signed, a recovering Cisco networking guy, that has since found greener pastures with Juniper and Palo Alto Networks.

[@markpriceful]

wow, nice job enabling remote work for your enterprise users with the Cisco VPN! I am also shocked it "just worked" out of the box

[@DanielTekmyster]

I built several franken pix firewalls in my dat, intel 1000TX worked for me, both fiber and copper.

[@clabretro]

nice!

[@callmebigpapa]

Fantastic video as always!! For all of my old gear that still uses Java and other outdated tech I have a dedicated XP VM with FF ESR 50 so it wont auto update......the VM is like a time capsule. Also you need a set of spludgers.

[@drgti16v]

It's a "roll-over" cable per Cisco lingo

[@-r-495]

that VAC is hot. I really like that concept as it is exactly what you‘d want, even before TPM really came to play. I used to have a date with corp IT, they plugged my units into their PiX and configured and validated their part and after a few dates we had dozens of units connected and configured. I need to get myself that HP brand squeegee. looks perfect 👌🏼

[@-r-495]

„I don’t need these PiX machines“ we all do.

[@clabretro]

😂

[@RandomTechWZ]

Networking is so cool, especially when it just works.

[@questionablecommands9423]

9:08 lol, you're the Hand Tool Rescue troll (most memorable is the time he sharpened a chisel to open a can of paint) of the vintage computing world.

[@halitimes2]

The PIX 535 had 64-bit PCI slots and the quad port card would run full speed in that box.

[@uiopuiop3472]

the squid cable.. so cool

[@WooShell]

Just in case you have a little time to waste, could you maybe put any old PCI VGA card in one of the slots? Since it's a regular x86 machine, I wonder whether it'd give a regular boot screen and BIOS, or whether that's all modified to their serial interface bootloader only.

[@clabretro]

Only one way to find out

[@RealEngineer]

Studied for 4 years and specialized in C#. What do I work with? You guessed it.. Java. 😂

[@KonradParzymieso]

The nightmares of config pasting and instantly being taken by box welcome to OG Cisco

[@Jamesaepp]

A thought on your wiring of the USB/serial connection. It's hard to describe succinctly, but at my college we had a setup where basically every row of students shared a rack of equipment. Each workstation on that row had something like four RJ45 connections (keystones) to the patch panel. You don't *have* to run ethernet protocol over ethernet cabling. It was very common for us to run serial connections over that wiring. Switch/Firewall/Router Console Port < -- Ethernet Cable -- > Rack Keystone < -- Structured Cabling -- > Workstation Keystone < -- Ethernet Cable -- > < -- RS232/USB Adapter -- > Terminal

[@cypher543]

I love old enterprise GUIs too! Digging into the hardware is interesting, but that probably should have been its own video. Just something to think about for future videos in the series. :)

[@clabretro]

yeah i got a little carried away there 😂

[@ayitsyaboi]

Truth about the Noctua fans. Any device I have that has a fan has a Noctua fan now. Notably my 3D printers. They're pricey but man is it worth it.

[@jeffmoss26]

Wow, a throwback!

[@Jamesaepp]

I know economizing video content is important but I wanted to throw out there - another reason for a minimum of two of everything is you can be nearly guaranteed to install system updates or perform maintenance at some point. Best to have two to minimize downtime. If not updates, you're guaranteed to make a configuration change at *some point*. Having an instant replica of the previous config in case a new config fails to take and crashes the system is always welcome.

[@derwildeKnut]

I have thousands of those blue rollover cables, they are almost one-Time-Use in my Hands

[@taldmd]

Beware about overlapping the VPN ip address pool with an existing ethernet subnet. In your demonstration it worked fine, but you might encounter issues if a device connected to the ethernet gets or sets an IP belonging to the VPN pool. Best is to use separate IP pools for the VPN service (client-to-site). Your PIX will know how to route between them.

[@nickwallette6201]

Was looking for this comment. When I first learned PIX, it was a bit of a head trip that things like VPN user pools and NAT pools could exist in an entirely ephemeral subnet with no “gateway” interface. They’re just … there … in the routing table, accessible via PFM.

[@clabretro]

definitely, I didn't even realize I had done that until I edited the video, didn't actually mean to overlap. was surprised it worked, feels like a headache in the making haha

[@casperghst42]

I remember the VPN Client and I do not miss it. But back then it was basically the only thing which existed. I think I still have the VPN Client for MacOS (from 2007 I think) which works with PiX (if I recall correctly).

[@JoshLiechty]

Well this explains a lot of the weirdness I remember from my time learning and using ASAs. I can't say that this makes ASDM make any more sense, but it does illuminate that that apple did not fall far from the tree.

[@clabretro]

I think you're right! I'll cover ASA someday too

[@cocusar]

This comment is not about the video, but you know I was subscribed to your channel and commented a handful of times, but all of the sudden, I'm unsubscribed. Wtf? I got this video from the "home" section, checked my subs feed and wasn't there. I'm really pissed because I don't want to miss your content. Oh man, I hope this doesn't happen again

[@James76767]

Same thing happened to me, annoying.

[@clabretro]

happens to me too! seems like that bug has been around forever

[@flp322]

I’ve heard that this happens when a channel grows quickly and KZbin thinks it’s bots. Not sure whether that’s really true, though.

[@hw2508]

The copper is for "grounding" or more precise for emc.

[@ranke]

Can confirm as ex cisco employee that the ram-stick is in the manual :-)

[@Username00011000]

Exciting series! Very cool.

[@seshpenguin]

Honestly I was 100% expecting that VPN connection to fail, because how could it actually be that easy, right? I'm surprised, those kinds of things can be really finicky!

[@dragonballbw3]

Uses for 4x 10/100 ports: - DMZ vlans (Pix5xx was not 802.1Q aware IIRC) - Inside/Outside ports for "firewall contexts" (aka VRFs) which I think required the big upgrade to PixOS 7+. I used Pix515Es as point-solution firewalls in a pinch if a system needed isolated in a subnet/vlan. 3 context, each with In/Out ports, all in transparent/layer2 mode = inline firewall, no IP re-addressing, etc.

[@Redd00]

Man I loved early 2000’s vpns

[@gametec_live]

another awsome obscure enterprise video, love it...

[@clabretro]

oh yes

[@cda32]

you should try those rubber pull through mounts noctua provides for more noise reduction

[@clabretro]

yeah I thought about it but it ended up basically silent even without them haha

[@GeoffSeeley]

It's been a few years since I last saw that VPN client software!

[@zelllers]

I remember if you had a large config, always having to be careful not to paste too much configuration at a time. The stdin was buffered before it reached the CPU and if the CPU was still processing the previous commands entered, eventually the buffer would run out. Pasted characters would be missed/skipped and some commands wouldn't work resulting in bad configuration. You would see the errors if this happened as it the config was being pasted... So in some cases you would have to copy and paste sections of the large config one at a time.

[@TheStefanskoglund1]

3:15 i believe the RJ socket is a fair bit less expensive and it is more compact too, so less area wasted on the rear of a device

[@nickwallette6201]

I see this as the biggest reason on a 1U network device. Having 8-port serial cards would be a lot more difficult with DE-9 plugs. Not to mention the convenience of patch panels.

[@SB-qm5wg]

I was doing networking in late 90s/early 2k. These 1st attempts at hardware admin guis were pretty bad. Everything Web-based wasn't really a thing yet. Some needed special Java versions. Others specific versions of Internet Explorer. When sonicwall came out I was blown away on how good the GUIs were compared to Cisco products.

[@adslf874yti3q7u4hf83]

I worked at Cisco when these things were being rolled out new. I think everyone hated PDM, but it was _very_ Cisco. The main backbone of Cisco support back then was "C3" (Cisco Customer... Connection? Care? I forget) which was an awful Java-based system that was slow as molasses. They really went into Java with both feet back then. I noticed it's running the UR license, which was _very_ expensive back in the day as well.

[@The_Electronic_Beard]

Another excellent video! Thanks for buying this stuff so i dont have to! 😂

[@clabretro]

haha thanks. my pleasure as always 🫡

[@peppigue]

this channel is tha bomb

[@sedrosken831]

Just a PSA, I don't know if you've got some sort of deal going on with Noctua, but I don't understand why they're so deeply loved in the community -- Arctic Cooling and beQuiet both make fans that are either just as good or better, and for less money. Though that color scheme is distinctive, so it's easy to tell at a glance if it's been modded or if the fan's just not spinning.

[@clabretro]

lol no special deal, I just know they work. they are damn expensive though, I'll try out Arctic Cooling and beQuiet next!

[@mateuszsp8ebc691]

Stupid question, but. Did You try to put VGA card in the PCI slot and check what happens? Of course I doubt that custom firmware will be able to boot anything but IOS, but just to curiosity :)

[@clabretro]

I didn't but I'm definitely going to try next time haha

[@Jerrec]

I wonder if you can add a graphics card in there and play Doom! 🙂 Also guess, you made the first documented Noctua mod of a PIX Firewall! :-)

[@vinatron8075]

Same with the ASA5520s I have.

[@bleeedthebrakes]

Fortinet sells a USB Console Cable with integrated serial converter. Never had strange issues with them Apple pushed gigabit ethernet to their PowerMac G4s in 2000, I will always remember the moment I discovered that fact.

[@LB4FH]

By the way, I seem to remember that you could slide the entire bracket with the cards sideways to extract them, just remove the two screws attaching it to the chassis and not those attaching it to the card. That may have been a different model though.

[@clabretro]

I'll have to try that!

[@TheStefanskoglund1]

I'm thinking about the probable thinking in Sun when they did the SC2000, the later E10k and E20k is this: SCSI has a number of problem so there was a multiple reasons for FC: a SC2k can use a LOT of Ultra SCSI interfaces - multiple interfaces/system card in fact - one blocker then became the size of the Ultra-Wide connector which restricts the number of possible interfaces - ie change connector Trouble with cable routing and cable lengths though differential signalling simplified that partly - but still a bulky cabling and still a restriction on how many disk enclosures/server and a restriction on possible layout in a DC. The answer was FC with compared with Ultrawide SCSI a nice increase in thruput and very large possiblity of higher speeds ie good enough for the next 20 years. The same with RJ modular plugs for ethernet over copper - suddenly being able to have 4 iface on one Sbus card.... So, Moore´s law also creates a demand for a more compact physical interface design if the capacity possibilities in a card is to be exploited fully. I wonder how early Solaris got the ability to trunk a lot of ifaces .... trunking is partly enabled by more compact phys designs.

[@johnkreno2488]

Great video, Keep it up

[@clabretro]

thanks!

[@StephenSD-P25]

I’m the type of person that doesn’t mind the extreme fan sound. I’ve got a 42U rack in my room that’s got a Cisco 2811, two 3524’s, one 1760, and the big daddy a Catalyst 5505 that’s been running in the background for the last 10 years or so. It’s to the point now that as whenever the power goes off it’s instantly too quiet and if I happen to be asleep when it happens, I’m wide awake because the silence is deafening. Hell my desktop has a total of 5 fans and I’ve got them cranked as high as they’ll go lol.

[@dss12]

Keep these coming!

[@Nabeelco]

Apple's been shipping GigE since 1999, and I think it was standard on everything as of 2001.

[@ricardog2165]

Don't forget to replace the button batteries!

[@clabretro]

already did!

[@dross1705]

What do kids use?? Kid Pix. What do adults use?? Cisco Pix.

[@leo_craft1]

You should disable noise reduction so we can hear the fans

[@mamba3968]

The VM in proxmox with the direct Network Cable is hella smart

[@clabretro]

it's been super useful

[@VSteam81]

Wow I'm early. I love this stuff!

[@frasermips]

CFM != Static Pressure Careful when replacing fans in old equipment, high CFM fans aren't perfect. CFM is more like a big room fan, it's great when there is lots of air to move around in an open room like air in a tower PC case. Static Pressure is more like a vacuum cleaner that can really suck the hot air of very small spaces. Some high performance computers required High Static Pressure, I know many SGI systems are like this but there are others. 1U & 2U Rack mount units can be pretty cozy, especially depending on the extra cards (heat generators / air blockers) that you have installed.

[@MrAzztech]

stuck those fans in a few switches, the difference is night and day lol

[@questionablecommands9423]

Every time I've worked for a company that had that same Cisco VPN software, I wondered, who the heck has so many VPN connections that they actually fill up the ... I _think_ Windows called it a 'watches' ... spreadsheet style view in the UI.

[@idahofur]

When I got into (well forced into. Different story.) Cisto asa firewalls. I decided to look into regular Cisco stuff. That is when I found out about GUI management software. Up until that point. I thought it was all console based using the cable. I even found out depending on what image? you could load on a cisco 2600 router had a built in web interface. Oh, and yes. I never seen such a convoluted use of web browser windows in my life. The Asa was just as bad requiring java to. The only other thing I can think of is I have a old intel net express and maybe some ILO or what not server managers via web interface.

[@nickwallette6201]

The early web GUIs were really stretching the definition of GUI. They just gave you a point-and-click CLI. You clicked “show” and got a list of commands, so you could click “running-config” and it would then show you the configuration. It counts. I guess. :-)

[@idahofur]

@@nickwallette6201 I remember seeing the first version of windows and thought it looked nothing more like dosshell. Then again remember the draw? Then you have dos menu systems that was nothing more than lines with title and then the title would just load your program. Oh and yes I know the Windows 1.x is more under the hood than just being a Dos Shell.

[@tompointdll]

Would love to know if a Pix could run somekind of OpenWRT or OPNSense 👀 would be a fun experiment

[@danieltaon]

Processors is Pentium II 433MHz

[@jfbeam]

CiscoSecure ACS is a TACACS+/RADIUS server. Not some magic serial management voodoo. The windows version is actually quite usable. The UNIX (Solaris) versions is absolute dog shit. Cisco used to have demo versions, but good luck find anything on ACS these days. (the modern-ish product is "ISA") That sticker just means it shipped with a demo version in the box.

[@waterflame321]

Time for comfy times. Damn that fan on the bottom when they stacked... Wouldn't it be useless?

[@clabretro]

yeah always thought that was weird

[@stonent]

I'm curious if this VPN client would still install on Windows 10, if not the 64bit version, maybe the 32bit version.

[@clabretro]

It installs on Win 11, doesn't run of course lol

[@pepelustig1802]

Nice

[@studioxxswe]

I have spent more time than I want to admit configuring Cisco ASAs using ASDM? but it I can see it roots came from PIX/PDM..... Fun fact: the VPN Wizard In one version of ASDM was broken, it didn't save all settings, quite irritating for a new network guy as I was at that time.. Fun fact 2 about pix/asa: in one version they changed I think NAT rules direction, outside became inside or something similar..

[@clabretro]

ha geez that NAT thing probably caused a lot of pain

[@Seris_]

You should go over some lantronix devices

[@megan_alnico]

Hey so I don't know if I should admit this or not but... I was a Java dev in the early 2000s and did GUIs in Swing for managing telecommunications equipment. I've got some war stories if you want some kind of insight as to what the industry was like back then.

[@clabretro]

No shame in that haha! If you want you can reach out to the email in the channel's about page, I'd love to hear the war stories.

[@Wintersky136]

14:54 VPN Hardware Encryption

[@kostis2849]

AVID used Gigabit in a lot of low-res networked editing systems in like 2002.

[@spectreofspace]

Would a Noctua mod be possible on a Sun T5140? I picked one up a couple weeks ago on eBay and that thing easily drowns out all the other equipment I have running. I was expecting something similar to my fairly quiet Sun Fire v100.

[@clabretro]

Possibly, but you'd have to be a lot more careful about temperatures when it comes to modding a server; take a lot of before and after temp measurements to ensure the new fans are cooling the machine adequately.

[@dawn1berlitz]

that firewall probably would be a botttle netck on my home network if i knew how to use one of those but i did notice it identifies the processor as a pentium 2 in it which is weird

[@thelettuceclub]

It's a pentium 2-based celeron processor. A previous video he did on a similar, smaller, PIX unit had him uncovering the chip to prove it.

[@jfbeam]

No "probably" about it... it's a 100Mbps device. Unless you have the worse ISP in the world (or an internet package equiv of food stamps), your connection will be faster than that, at least in the downstream direction. That's why I stopped using them years ago. I do so love the 515, 501, even the 5505, but 100 is just too slow.

[@1993MAZDAMIATA]

Looks like morlee still works at Cisco haha

[@KalamazooEAS]

Did you know they make RJ45 to USB console cables? I have one and manage all of my cisco gear with it- it's great! One less thing for me to carry around.

[@clabretro]

yeah just don't have one haha

[@revision386]

What would happen if you put a VGA card in it?

[@clabretro]

good question! probably not a lot, but i'll have to try that

[@d3yuen]

Most (?) Sun network cards have (IIRC) Sun "BIOS" on them ... maybe a more generic network cards like *gasp 3c905 might have a higher chance of working?

[@clabretro]

yeah didn't expect it to work, just the only NIC I had

[@bcupp15]

Are they standard PCI slots? What would happen if you threw a video card in one for giggles?

[@clabretro]

they are! I'll have to try that

[@Jae_972]

trying to setup mine right now. what version of java JRE did you use? I'm not able to get PDM to launch from firefox or ie.

[@clabretro]

I was able to run it with Java 1.3.1 and Firefox 3.0.3 on Windows XP

[@pavelvrasskii1359]

New noctua FAN cost more expensive than two old cisco's equip =)

[@Ironapple09]

Stick a GPU in the PIX lol, curious if it outputs anything

[@jfbeam]

It won't. The early PIXen were literally PC's with a "magic" ISA (and later PCI) flash board. (Intel motherboards)

[@hw2508]

Not only Java but also Flash. I wanted to access an old Watchguard device a couple of years ago and needed to find a working Flash installation. I think it was, even back then, a risky thing to base the configuration of devices on such software environments. Java a maybe back then, but Flash IMHO a total stupid decision for network infrastructure.

[@cleverlyblonde]

I believe Microsoft Lync 2010 both server AND client use Microsoft Silverlight, their Flash/Shockwave alternative. That's... fun 😅

[@xrtnn]

For gigabit connectivity you wolud like to install any Intel i82542 or i82543 based NIC

[@jfbeam]

The only ones I recall the PIX software understanding were SX optical cards. (I've tried many others, and it wouldn't take them)

[@perryraybuck1239]

Great video! any chance I can get a link to the archive where to get the PDM software from? I have a pix 115E myself and I would like to try this out.

[@clabretro]

yeah there's a few if you search "cisco pix product" on archive.org. I think this is the one I used: archive.org/details/cisco-pix-500-series-security-appliances-and-cisco-asdm-product-cd

[@perryraybuck1239]

@@clabretro thanks a lot! I tried installing it but sadly I don’t have enough RAM. I need to figure out how to get an unrestricted license on it, it currently has a restricted license, which I pretty sure limits it to only 96 MB of RAM. Which is what is currently installed.

[@andresbravo2003]

There’s a software?

[@jfbeam]

I wouldn't really call it "remote" management. It can be managed across the network - but so is telnet/ssh. Access outside the local management network ("inside", etc.) is up to the admin. (i've seen many lazy admins allow 0/0)

[@clabretro]

that's what the VPN is for ;)

[@mrmikerotch]

Nah, need to upgrade to AT LEAST dd4 for opening chassis'. More cranks in ddr4.

[@AlejandroFerrariMc]

Linksys stack is out of control!