"Jason P. Wilcox" wrote:
>
> Where would something such as a Cisco PIX fall in your equation? Is it
> hardware or software?
As far as I know, PIXes are standard industrial design PCs
with PCI buses and standard NICs.
(Please correct me if I'm wrong -- I've never picked one
apart myself)
By the definitions I used in my previous message, it'd be a
"hardware" solution since it comes pre-installed on a PC.
A while ago, I took a peek at the innards of a D-Link
DI-701 "personal firewall" - a freestyle-sized plastic
box with two ethernet interfaces, a serial port, and
eight LEDs.
This sounds very "hardware" at first. Then you take a look at
what's in it and find an AMD low power consumption processor
and a piece of flash RAM.
Look at the specs of the AMD processor, and you'll see that it
is a fully 80x86 compatible CPU.
Then take a look at the "firewall image" files that you can upload
to the "firewall" through the serial port. Stick it in an x86
disassembler and you'll see that it's plain intel machine code.
Yup, just another PC with preinstalled software, even though
its physical design is quite far from what we're used to
calling "PCs". You could quite conceivably write your own
firewall in your favourite windows/linux based development
environment and upload it to that little plastic box :-P
(Although you'd have to write your own drivers)
--
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