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CCSA Home Lab
As most of you may already know by now, I recently relocated to the beautiful Island of Bermuda and started a new gig. Part of my job role will be to deploy and support Checkpoint firewalls. This means that I would need to get up to speed on how these firewalls work pretty quickly. Given this, I figured it would be a good idea to blog about my experiences with these devices as a way to both understand and store my thoughts for future references.
Building a home lab for my studies turned out to be a whole lot easier than I had first anticipated. Everything I needed to be able to study for the exams and also practice deploying the devices could be virtualized. Below you can find my home lab blue print.
- Lenovo ThinkPad with 8GB of RAM and lots of disk space.
- VMware Workstation 7
- Two Windows Server 2003 VMs
- One Windows 7 (host install on my laptop)
- Two Security Gateways
- One Security Management Server
- Checkpoint SecurePlatform R75.20
One of the 2K3 VMs was configured with the RRAS role to act as a router while the other was used just as a general client sitting behind the firewall. Any client OS such as Windows XP/Vista/7 can work but I was too lazy to install another OS, so I copied the VM for the server 2K3 🙂 . I also used my windows 7 host OS as a client sitting behind one of the gateways; this way I was able to do ping tests to the remote site when testing my VPN configurations.
As you can see, it’s a very basic setup, but should allow me to test most of the stuff relevant to the exams.
