the cisco pix firewall lets you establish stateful firewall protection and secure vpn access with a single device. pix firewall provides a scalable security solution with failover support available for selected models to provide maximum reliability. pix firewall uses a specialized operating system that is more secure and easier to maintain than software firewalls that use a general-purpose operating system,which are subject to frequent threats and attacks.

    this chapter describes how you can use the pix firewall to protect your network assets and to establish secure vpn access. it contains the following sections:

    · controlling network access

    · protecting your network from attack

    · enabling specific protocols and applications

    · creating a virtual private network

    · pix firewall system management

    · pix firewall failover

    · where to go from here