TacAck – My security journey!

Hell All,

To sum it up in one sentence, INE vol 2 Lab 4 was HELL( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell ) ! The configuration sections were just too long and very very tough. I had a 5.5 hour time period in which i had to finish the lab, but i only managed to finish 4 sections , and half of one other section.

The sections i finished were :

• ASA
  • Very long
  • I wouldn’t call this tough , but it wasn’t easy either. Required a lot of thinking
• IOS F/w
  • This section was relatively easy, but it took a long time ( considering that there were only 2 tasks  ).
  • The ZBPF section was a little tricky, because i had to keep revisiting this, because a lot of the later configs had to be accounted for when doing the configuration.
• VPN
  • There was an IPSec HA section. To be honest, i’d like to think i’m good with IPSec HA ( because i’ve practiced it many times ) , but i just didn’t understand the question.
  • I don’t know if  my understanding was flawed or if the question was worded badly. Either way, i couldn’t configure it.
  • There was a troubleshooting question here , which was pretty simple. Again, this got a little more complicated because, the router which had the issue was also running ZBPF. So , had to account for that. ( More time spent )
• ID MGMT
  • They had 2 , i repeat 2 NAC sections. Since i didn’t know NAC , i just skipped these and moved on
  • Even the command authorization section was tough.
• CONTROL PLANE SECURITY
  • 2/3 tasks were easy.
  • One task was tough. ( required a lot of thinking , digging up the doc-cd ). However i’m still not convinced about the answer. I must ask some folks on OSL.
• IPS
  • The only section which was simple.
  • The penultimate task threw me off slightly, but i somehow figured out what to do. (Took some time)
• ADVANCED SECURITY
  • Again, not very difficult configurations, but they were very detailed and i took a lot of time configuring and testing them. I’d like to think they’re correct, but i’ll only know once i tally them with the answers.
  • I skipped the last task because i felt i was running out of time.
• NETWORK ATTACKS
  • Didn’t have time to do this.

As you can see, i couldn’t finish the lab in the 5.5 hours. So i managed to save the configs and i’m going to try it again sometime soon ( maybe tomorrow ).

I’d love to hear from you about how your studies are going! Please feel free to buzz me on twitter ( @tacack ) , or by e-mail ( tacack at tacack dot com ) , or by just commenting to this post.

Cheers and Happy studying!

TacACK