Passed NGX CCSE Accelerated

[jphrhodes]

I thought I should pass on my views of the CCSE NGX Upgrade Exam for all of you out there who are still hanging on...

Firstly I passed with 75%, not a huge score, but a pass is a pass, and in under 40 minutes.

My experience with Checkpoint products is in a large but fairly simple environment, a little bit of user authentication, NAT and Smart Defense. No QOS, VPN, Desktop Security Clients or anything else flash.

I actually found the upgrade exam easier than the original CCSE NG that I took three years ago.

There were a fair number of VPN questions, mainly pertaining to cypher strengths and the uses of SHA-1 against AES (remember AES encrypts and SHA-1 is a digest). Also some advanced rulebase configuration (ordering of rules, managing global properties and viewing implied and hidden rules). A few QOS questions, most of which I was familiar with from Checkpoint's own document (link to follow). Quite a lot of questions on the Client utilities, especially the differences between Tracker, Monitor and Eventia with an angle on auditing.

There were maybe eight questions on authentication which I did not prepare for and could not remember from previous exams. Well worth reading up on.

There were also two or three question on the usage of 'fw' from the command line, all to do with loading and unloading of policies. A few questions on VPN dynamic routing, another few on LDAP schema importing and one question on clustering using multicast.

All in all, not too taxing, if you have a recent CCSE then this should be no problem, just swat up on QOS, the document is here http://www.checkpoint.com/services/e...ngx_sample.pdf

Good Luck!

John

[Gavrilo]

I passed this exam on 28th November and can say that I would re-iterate what has already been said. Lots of ClusterXL and HA questions, understand Multicasting and Unicasting. You should also be familiar with the GUI's, NAT and quite a bit from the CCSA courses as well.

Can anyone comment on the new CCSE Plus NGX exam and also the CCMA that is being written at the moment.

Regards

Gavrilo