The Bastille Hardening program "locks down" an operating system, proactively configuring the system for increased security and decreasing its susceptibility to compromise. Bastille can also assess a system's current state of hardening, granularly reporting on each of the security settings with which it works.

In this article I'm going to detail how to setup and run a Cisco PIX firewall in GNS3 on OS X. As of writing Pemu which is the software used to emulate the PIX currently doesn't support OS X. So in order to get our PIX running we'll need to build either a local or remote virtual machine with a supported OS for running Pemu. For the purposes of this article we'll use VirtualBox with an Ubuntu 9.04 guest OS. We will be using the asa723-k8.bin IOS image for this tutorial.

In this research seminar, we will read and discuss the very recent literature on the design and implementation of processor clusters, virtual machines, virtual storage, and datacenter networking organization. Architectural approaches to deal with failures, effective sharing of processing/storage/network resources, and efficient management of power across the systems stack will be considered. Some class meetings will be dedicated to meeting with and discussing issues with industrial leaders from Google, IBM, Cisco, and Network Appliances.