just curious, any of you on here ever manged any of these devices? i have read alot on CISCO PIX overall, but have never been in front of one. same goes for MS' ISA server. which one would you say is a better defense in a network environment? i have heard ISA servers have very robust abilities when it comes to drilling-down and delving in deep as far as packet/protocol inspection is concerned. thoughts?
Even tough I haven't used any of those above devices,Like you i do readed a lot about those 2,especially PIX,i once asked a similar question to some networking folks,they had said PIX is best when compared to ISA,But a kind of draw-back is PIX is bit harder to configure ,but worthy when comes to security...
First off, Microshit is terrible when it comes to security; period... Cisco has been on the top of security for a very long time; personally I would always choose Cisco, or any *nix software/hardware, over Microshit any day.
Coming from personal experience; I will say that configuring a PIX is not simple, but it's not complicated either... If you can understand your way around various CLI's, iptables, and various networking and routing techniques, it's pretty simple. Took me 30 minutes to learn the system when I was 17. From there in an in-class hands on exercise; it took me all of 5 minutes to completely re-configure it. Though I will say, it's much harder to exploit from outside the network; whereas windows systems are too easy to exploit outside the network.
"Mind, body, heart, and soul; when all work as one, this is control." - myself