NSM on Cisco AXP?

Last year I wrote Run Apps on Cisco ISR Routers. That was two weeks after our April Fool's joke that the Sguil Project Was Acquired by Cisco.

I am wondering if any TaoSecurity Blog readers are using Cisco AXP in production? Looking at the data sheet for the modules, they appear too underpowered for NSM applications, especially at the price point Cisco is advertising.

Richard Bejtlich is teaching new classes in Europe and Las Vegas in 2009. Online Europe registration ends by 1 Apr, and seats are filling. Early Las Vegas registration ends 1 May.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I would be wary of those NME's. They look like similar to the rounter IDS module platform. In my previous job we had a disappointing failure rate (~50%) on the hard drives. Cisco used 2.5" laptop hard drives that did not fare well in the environments that routers typically operate in such as wiring closets. Additionally the drives were not rated for 24 x 7 operation. The platform with the flash memor may fare better but the CPU looks underpowered.
10:02 AM
Martin said…
Ah, that reminds me of the good 'ol days when I took a screwdriver and removed the faceplate from a NAM module in a 6509. When I plugged a keyboard and monitor into the unit and got a root password prompt, I dug a little deeper and found that it was just RedHat 7.3. So, I removed the hard drive from the unit, booted it as the secondary hard drive in a different computer, and reset the password. From there I basically had a fully functional RedHat box with a 6509 backplane interface. But just as I was ready to start doing some cool things, I found that most of the necessary tools to compile and install things were missing. I was new to Linux at the time, so after trying for a few hours to get a new Linux kernel to compile with the backplane drivers, I eventually gave up. I wish now that I had pursued that a little more, as I'm sure that now I'd know what I was doing with it. Unfortunately, the hardware was nothing more than a commodity-grade Pentium 3 and a small amount of RAM, so it sounds like these AXP modules are about in the same boat. Still, the idea of having a customizable SW module with a backplane interface has always been tantalizing. But for all of the geek appeal, with any kind of significant bandwidth, that hardware just won't cut it.
1:31 AM
Anonymous said…
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
6:19 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

MITRE ATT&CK Tactics Are Not Tactics

Image
Just what are "tactics"? Introduction MITRE ATT&CK  is a great resource, but something about it has bothered me since I first heard about it several years ago. It's a minor point, but I wanted to document it in case it confuses anyone else. The MITRE ATT&CK Design and Philosophy document from March 2020 says the following: At a high-level, ATT&CK is a behavioral model that consists of the following core components: • Tactics, denoting short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack; • Techniques, describing the means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals; • Sub-techniques, describing more specific means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals at a lower level than techniques; and • Documented adversary usage of techniques, their procedures, and other metadata. My concern is with MITRE's definition of "tactics" as "short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack," which is oddly recursive. The key word in the tacti...
Read more

Zeek in Action Videos

Image
This is a quick note to point blog readers to my Zeek in Action YouTube video series for the Zeek network security monitoring project .  Each video addresses a topic that I think might be of interest to people trying to understand their network using Zeek and adjacent tools and approaches, like Suricata, Wireshark, and so on.  I am especially pleased with Video 6 on monitoring wireless networks . It took me several weeks to research material for this video. I had to buy new hardware and experiment with a Linux distro that I had not used before -- Parrot .  Please like and subscribe, and let me know if there is a topic you think might make a good video.
Read more

New Book! The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4

Image
  I've completed the TaoSecurity Blog book series . The new book is  The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4: Beyond the Blog with Articles, Testimony, and Scholarship .  It's available now for Kindle , and I'm working on the print edition.  I'm running a 50% off promo on Volumes 1-3 on Kindle through midnight 20 April. Take advantage before the prices go back up. I described the new title thus: Go beyond TaoSecurity Blog with this new volume from author Richard Bejtlich. In the first three volumes of the series, Mr. Bejtlich selected and republished the very best entries from 18 years of writing and over 18 million blog views, along with commentaries and additional material.  In this title, Mr. Bejtlich collects material that has not been published elsewhere, including articles that are no longer available or are stored in assorted digital or physical archives. Volume 4 offers early white papers that Mr. Bejtlich wrote as a network defender, either for technica...
Read more