Installing V7 software on a Cisco PIX 506E I had read all of the junk from Cisco saying the PIX 506E would only run up to version 6.3 of the PIX operating system. I didn.t believe them and wanted to test this for myself. After checking the memory requirements for version 7 I knew it was going to be tight but I was quietly confident that it could be done. My 506E had 8MB of flash and 32MB of RAM. This was nowhere near enough. The PIX stores the software image and the PDM image in flash and 32MB of RAM would run version 7 but it would be nowhere near enough for it to run well. The image file for version 7 (version 7.0.2) is just over 5MB. Which is the same size as version 6.3 and the PDM combined. So theoretically it could be done but I would have to lose the PDM image. The documentation on CCO says you can simply do an .erase flashfs. on the PIX and it will completely erase the flash memory. But in my experience it doesn.t. From what I could tell this only erased the partition table. A show flashfs showed various files but the listing was just a load of jumbled up numbers. When I tried to tftp the new PIX image over it fails complaining of not enough space to copy the image. Further investigation found the command .delete flash://pdm. but again this failed. Feeling rather bemused by this I did some more Googling. I came across a forum post somewhere that suggested copying a new PDM image over from a TFTP server then stopping the transfer half way through. The PIX will then timeout and delete the existing PDM image. Brilliant! This worked a treat. I.m sorry I can.t find the website address for this forum post but when I do I will credit it here. Before any attempt to run version 7 I needed to upgrade the RAM. The 506E case is quite slim and as such you are restricted to the size of RAM the PIX will hold. Luckily I had a single stick of 128MB PC100 SDRAM that fitted perfectly. I did try a 256MB PC133 stick just out of interest but the PIX did not even bring up the BIOS loader. Looks like it is locked at PC100. When the PIX rebooted back into monitor mode I attempted to copy the new image file over from the tftp server. Bizarrely, the transfer would fail and timeout everytime unless I gave the gateway parameter. I couldn.t figure out why this caused the transfer to fail as the PIX and the TFTP server (my laptop) were on the same 192.168.2.0 address range. After an hour trying various things like rebooting my laptop and trying another cat5 cable I had success, the image file had copied over to the PIX.s flash memory. I powered it off then back on again and watched the boot loader go through the POST sequence then load the image. Success! I was very pleased to see the Cisco logo and the version number of 7.0.2. Feeling brave I then repeated the process and eventually settled on version 7.1. The transfer fails with version 7.2.2 which just creeps over the 8MB image size. I wasn.t too bothered about this. Not only did I have a PIX running version 7 software but I.d also managed to get it running fast and as a bonus it meant I didn.t have to shell out money for an ASA 5505. Which is the equivalent spec as the 506E in terms of SOHO/ROBO usage. What I would like to do next is build some sort of FrankenPIX from a few old Intel machines I have and eventually I would like to start hacking the PIX hardware to see if it will run Linux. Apparently the ASA.s have use of the USB port for flash memory. Although this is unconfirmed and I dont have any hardware to test this I would like to find a way to enable this on the PIX. This would then allow the USB port to be used as flash memory. http://www.rownet.co.uk/installing-v7-software-on-a-cisco-pix-506e/