Thursday, November 4, 2010

Fun with PIX, Part I

When meeting with a potential customer the other day, she mentioned that she had a running PIX with an unknown password.

I thought I'd refresh my PIX skills and decided to bust out an old PIX 506E we had sitting in the office. After the unfortunate re-realization that my laptop doesn't have a serial port (and the resulting short jaunt to the computer store to get a USB-to-Serial cable), I consoled into the PIX and turned it on.

My adventure was short-lived, however. While watching the boot-up, I was greeted with a hung firewall:

CISCO SYSTEMS PIX FIREWALL
Embedded BIOS Version 4.3.207 01/02/02 16:12:22.73
Compiled by morlee
32 MB RAM

PCI Device Table.
Bus Dev Func VendID DevID Class Irq
00 00 00 8086 7192 Host Bridge
00 07 00 8086 7110 ISA Bridge
00 07 01 8086 7111 IDE Controller
00 07 02 8086 7112 Serial Bus 9
00 07 03 8086 7113 PCI Bridge
00 0D 00 8086 1209 Ethernet 11
00 0E 00 8086 1209 Ethernet 10

And that's all she wrote.

Fortunately, there's an easy enough work-around.

1. Power off the device.
2. Remove the cover. There are two Phillips screws located at the top rear of the unit. The top half slides back about an inch or so and then lifts off.


3. Locate the J5 jumper. It should be right next to the CMOS battery. Move it over 1 PIN.


4. Power on the device.
5. After unit has booted, power off.
6. Replace cover.

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