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.