Super-Networking Blog

Here is an update for those people who are looking for an entry level PIX that can still do the job for you. The Cisco PIX 506e is a small/medium business firewall that costs under $1000. It comes with two 10/100 ports and can support up to 25,000 sessions.

One problem I ran into is even though according to Cisco this Pix can support two physical and two logical interfaces when I tried to setup logical interfaces it tells me a have a restricted license and I have use the max interfaces which is two. Well my first thought was that it wasn’t working with a restricted license and some of the PIX licensing pages looked to show restricted and unrestricted licenses. Found out there are only restricted licenses for the 506E, so what next?

In more digging I found out that you need to be running version 6.3(5) or greater to support VLANS. If you do a show version on the pix with a version before this you will get Maximum physical interfaces: 2 and Maximum Interfaces: 2 . After the upgrade you will get Maximum physical interfaces: 2 and Maximum Interfaces: 4 . Now you can create logical interfaces.

interface 1 vlan10 physical (Sets VLAN on Physical Interface)

interface 1 vlan10 Logical (Sets up a Logical Interface)

Couple of good FYIs:

enable password is blank by default but it will still prompt you for it so hit enter

To set your pix back to default config say if you got a used one use this command:

configure factory-default