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Can a Cisco Pix 501 be hacked to run Linux with a similar feature set?

Is this possible? Has it ever been done?

The pix seems like reliable solid-state hardware and it would be cool if I could run an open source solution on it.

The Cisco Pix 501 is no longer supported by Cisco. It will only do ssh version one, and its dhcp won't reliably reserve ip leases.

Update: Why was I down-voted for this question, and why was it closed as being off-topic? It is a fair question related to popular networking component that's become a little outdated.

Since Cisco offers no further updates for the device (to fix its non-standard implementation of dhcp), I thought it might be a good idea to put a community supported networking OS onto it. You'd think I've type profanity, the way this question was treated.

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    16MB of ram is a little tight, huh? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cisco_PIX
    – LonnieBest
    Mar 3, 2013 at 18:35
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    16 MB of RAM is tight, but not undoable. Same with the 8 MB storage (compare it to similar small systems such as a ---Cisco--- Linksys WRT-54G where you can install OpenWRT ot Potatoe. Those are based on a Linux kernal. However possible and cool as it might be, I am not sure I would want to test this in a corporate or professional environment. At home and just to see if it can be done is something else, but that in not this sites focus.
    – Hennes
    Mar 3, 2013 at 18:42

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Nah, this probably won't work, especially with a Pix 501. The hardware is pretty standard AMD and Intel networking, but this is still proprietary hardware. Doing the reverse (Pix on Linux) is possible, though.

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CISCO boxes are more or less standard hardware, but the switching/routing mesh of most is a closely held secret, with almost no chance to have any open source support, ever. So, yes, you might run Linux on the box, but not for its intended purpose.

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