CCSA Certification

I put together some advice for taking the CCSA Exam as part of some promo material.  I see it’s been posted to about.com:
10 Tips for Acing the CCSA Exam

Any other advice to share?

I’ve been spending too much time fighting comment spam in my Movable Type blogs. This is my first conversion to Word Press. Once I get the site configured, I plan to post some articles about the conversion from AI to NGX.

In a nutshell, nothing in the book is incorrect when it comes to the new exams. What has changed is the addition of VPNs (site to site), LDAP, and content security. Some product names have changed (yet again), so be wary of that.

I haven’t seen any published reviews of the book yet, but here are some things people have said over on the forums.

“I just wanted to say that Sean’s book was one of the best books that I have used for studying for a certification. I passed the CCSA certification with an 81% on the 27th of Sept.”

“Passed with 80% this morning. Sean’s book was spot-on; would definitely recommend it.”

“I just passed the CCSA exam today, got 85%, thanks for all the support.
Sean, the book was 100% spot-on, it’s pretty much the main source I used for my preparation and I can confim it was sufficient…”

I’ve heard from several people that the software on the CD included with the book crashes after question 16. I went through my publisher, but didn’t hear anything, so I called Exam Force directly. I was put in touch with Robert Poe, the Customer Service Manager.

He told me that Exam Force was aware of the problem almost immediately, and issued a fix. From the File menu, there should be an Update option, which will download the fixes and some newer questions. He also encouraged people to email him (poe at examforce dot com) if there were further problems.

Kudos to Exam Force for being on top of this one.

I just got an email that the CCSA NGX exam #156-215 (and other exams for the other certs) will be released on August 15th. This exam covers the NGX/R60 product, where the current exam (and my book) is for NG-AI/R55.

I’m currently looking at the exam outline and the differences in the products. They don’t look too great so far, which means my plan is to write up a couple of chapters covering the new material and release it on the Internet as an update to the book. Whether or not a successive printing of the book is updated is up to my publisher.

That said, this isn’t the end of the world. Anyone with their CCSA in NG-AI has it for three years. Check Point will likely offer the NG-AI exam until the successor to NGX comes out. This means that if you’re studying for the CCSA there is nothing wrong with taking the NG-AI version.

I just noticed Que put a sample chapter online.

http://www.examcram2.com/articles/article.asp?p=387728

It’s Chapter 3, Defining Security Policies with Smart Dashboard.

A sharp eyed reader pointed out the following:

Page 22: firewalls should be singular, ie firewall
Page 130: Missing the word “user”: If the traffic is not one of those four, or is specified as Any Service, then you can’t use user authentication.

Page 72, Figure 4.1 – “Fragments”, not “Fragements”
Page 101, Figure 6.1 – “Offset = 500″, not “Offset = 5000″
Page 150, first paragraph – “The inbound kernel notices the destination port of 10001″, not “The inbound kernel notices the source port of 10001″

On the flip side of the last correction, I see the blurb above the picture of the firewall is incorrect. It should read “10.0.0.8 100.0.0.8″.

I missed this one in the final review. If I ever do a book again, I’ll be sure to use IP addresses that aren’t so similar

Table 8.2, rows 5 and 6 should be ‘i’ and ‘I’ respectively for the fw monitor inspection point column, not the other way around.

Please send any other errata to me at sean at ccsacertification dot com. I’ve been asked to submit a list of any errors by July 21, 2005 so that they can be fixed in the next printing. All errata will still be posted here.