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R.I.P. Cisco PIX, I Hardly Knew Ye

I know how this sounds, but I love my Cisco PIX firewalls. Like my 2000 Toyota Camry with 150,000 miles, my PIX firewalls just work day after day, always blinking green, passing packets and making people happy. And now, on July 28, I'm reminded that Cisco is mercilessly assassinating the PIX line of firewalls.

Yesterday, a PR agency took pride in reminding some of the nice folks at InformationWeek that the Cisco PIX line of firewalls will officially die in a few days. It's not like this news took us by surprise, we all knew the day was coming. And I guess Cisco is being generous by continuing to at least support the PIX for another 5 years. But I still feel like I've been reminded of a family member's terminal illness.

Frank Bulk, master of all network infrastructure technologies at InformationWeek, tells us to get over it. He's probably right. I know the ASA is PIX on steroids. And yeah, an ASA looks and feels like a PIX. And sure, the ASA's run PIX 7.x (except the ASA 5505), so the look and feel of the CLI will be the same.

So why am I so upset? I guess I just hate being bullied into ripping out infrastructure that's worked so well for so long. I had the same problem being forced to upgrade my Windows 2000 servers, and my NT 4.0 servers before that (but I was happy to replace my NetWare servers, please, no hate mail).

So tell me, should I really upgrade for the sake of upgrading?

For me, I'll continue to take pride in setting new ROI world records.

Anyone out there still running NT 3.5 server in production? I'd love to hear some funny stories about insanely outdated technology still being used your production environment!

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