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Getting Checkpoint Experience

Hi

I am wanting to get some hands on experience with Checkpoint. In the past I have always purchased equipment (Juniper, Cisco etc) to get this experience. Can someone tell me what kind of hardware I should be looking for to start building my own Checkpoint FW. This will only be used at home so cost-effectiveness has priority over performance but I do not want to lose functionality i.e. it can do things slowly - as long as it does them.

Any feedback would be great.

Thanks

Reply to
VeeDub
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You don't need much. Their OS, SecurePlatform (a.k.a. SPLAT) is a rebuild of RedHat 3. I ran the beta versions of NGX on a 300 MHz P-II (yes, P-II) with

256 MB of RAM. It was an ancient IBM Netfinity server.

Ray

Reply to
Jay

Thanks Ray

I am new to Checkpoint and have never installed or looked at is so am definitely just starting out. So their software will run on a standard x86 platform? If that is the case, do you know if it will run as a virtual machine in VMWare? Finally, what are the benefits to running on a dedicated appliance such as a Nokia box? I presume higher performance due to purpose built CPU's etc but anything else?

Thanks VD

Jay wrote:

Reply to
VeeDub

I know that SmartCenter R62 will run in Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2. Nah, the "appliance" moniker is way overused. Nokia provides a pre-hardened operating system based on FreeBSD from years ago called IPSO, but nowadays that's probably the only resemblance to FreeBSD because they have modified it so much. One thing I like about the Nokia boxes is that you can have two complete versions of the OS installed. You can install an upgrade and do a "test reboot" into it. If you don't confirm that you want to keep it within five minutes, it automatically reboots back into the previous OS version. It makes remote upgrades much less worrisome.

Check Point now has their SecurePlatform operating system (a.ka."SPLAT") based on RedHat v3 and it comes with the product. If you need routing protocols like OSPF on it, you have to go with the extra cost version called SecurePlatform Pro. Nokia boxes come with just about all routing protocols except BGP as standard. BGP requires an extra cost license.

If you're using SPLAT, they have a hardware compatibility matrix on their web site. Check Point also runs on Solaris and Windows, although for the life of me I cannot figure out why anyone would want to do either.

Ray

Reply to
JJ

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