Author Topic: Install IOS 7 on Cisco PIX 506E  (Read 6420 times)

netfreak

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Install IOS 7 on Cisco PIX 506E
« on: December 09, 2012, 12:59:36 am »
So… I bought a Cisco PIX 506E on eBay for $40 with the intention of turning it into a transparent firewall. After I bought it, I discovered PIX 6.3 (the highest version available for the 506E according to Cisco) only offers routing mode firewall. This just wouldn’t do. I google’d for a good hour and then got down to it. Here is how I installed PIX OS 7.12 onto my 506E. Required things: PIX 506E with a good 96mb RAM or more, another computer running TFTP, PIX OS image (7.12 is probably the latest that would work within the 8mb flash limit).

1) Boot the PIX 506E into monitor mode (hit esc during boot when it says so)
2) Configure the IP/gateway details of the PIX interface, and the file/IP of the TFTP server (pretty straight forward, type help for command list)
3) Run the TFTP and watch as your PIX downloads and boots into the new PIX OS
4) Configure the connected interface as you will need to TFTP again. Keep in mind you’re now using much different command syntax compared to the PIX 6.x stuff.
5) Do “format flash:” to erase the flash memory
6) Do “copy tftp flash” and enter TFTP server details and new PIX OS image name
7) Wait a while…
8) Should be written to flash memory. Go ahead and reload the PIX and boot off flash

Apparently in later versions of 7.x they added something to prevent it from being installed on a PIX 506E. People have got around it by changing instances of 506E to 515E throughout the PIX OS image. Also keep in mind you only have 8mb of flash to hold the image, and 7.12 runs in around 6.5mb.