Cisco PIX-501-BUN-K9 3des Security Appliance

by Cisco

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 6.2 x 5.5 x 1 inches ; 5.4 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 5.1 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B00006B6GD
• Item model number: PIX-501-BUN-K9
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #167,186 in Electronics (See Top 100 in Electronics)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: June 21, 2002

Product Description

Cisco PIX Firewall 501 - Firewall - 4 ports - 10 Connections - EN, Fast EN

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A hardware firewall without peer, July 24, 2002

By 

Mark Guzowski (Idaho Falls, Idaho USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cisco PIX-501-BUN-K9 3des Security Appliance (Personal Computers)

The phrase 'Cisco powers the internet' is considerably more than just a marketing slogan. Quite literally this is the best firewall a home user can buy, without qualification. It contains the same software as others costing 5 figures, which protect the most prestigious assets one can imagine. It's hard to truly describe how much engineering talent & know-how one is getting for a song with the PIX 501.

Why do home users need something of this quality? Only you can answer that, but let me provide a few pointers. First off, the PIX 501 is not just reserved for people with seriously expensive computer setups. The real question is: Do you feel you have something of value to protect? Like perhaps years worth of creative artistry on perhaps just a single PC (which might have cost less than a grand!)? And do you need/want to stay on the internet for long periods of time? If any of these are true, this may very well be the product for you. And yes, I use this product with dial-up & another wireless router.

Physically the PIX 501 is just a bit larger than an external modem (although not quite as thick!). Cisco's customer support (both live & via the web) has been above average so far. The live TAC support reminded me of L.L. Bean, and the docs present on the web show a depth very few other tech sites can match (outside of corps like MSFT, IBM, etc).

Mine arrived without 3DES enabled, which made the web interface appear dead. The issue was detailed on their web site, and the TAC people dealt with it promptly and professionally. (If you buy one and PDM appears dead, before panicking just use show version to see if DES/3DES is enabled)

I'm not going to argue the software vs. hardware firewall issue. Personally I've been burned too many times by the popular software firewalls which literally don't support the high-end XP/win2k environment I use. This HW solution does (and so does ISA from MSFT).

This product is *very* deep, and could take some real effort to install in non-vanilla environments. Yet, I think most home users don't have complex computer setups! Even most win2K domain users don't usually dive too deeply into the feature bag MSDN offers. I bet most people could probably install this product right out of the box. You can always download the manuals first & check it out before buying (like I did). It took me about 10 hours of real work to install, and I don't have a vanilla environment.