I recently upgraded a Nokia VPN210 to IPSO 3.7 for the company of a friend of mine. Then I upgraded their CheckPoint from, uh... I think it was FP3 (or it may have been earlier) to NG with Application Intelligence. Prior to that, I had never heard of a Nokia VPN210 and had only barely heard the name CheckPoint associated with security. But, hey, I had some documentation. It's a special situation.

Now I am being asked to go to a customer site and upgrade their CheckPoint with FP3 to NG with AI on a Linux box. Uh, I don't even work for the company! I'm doing it for the experience because their business is down like so many other tech companies. But, this is an opportunity to get some sort of 1099 payment on a contracting basis, maybe.

Anyway, I don't have all of the details yet about the customer's linux box, but if you have experience with installing the latest CheckPoint on Linux then I could use any pointers you could throw my way.

At this point, it just looks like I will be doing the upgrade and not doing any of the subsequent configuration. And since the Nokia IPSO is basically a unix system (BSD based I think) I am assuming that the upgrade on the linux box will be very similar to the upgrade on the Nokia 'pizza' box. I guess one factor that may come up might be the kernel version being compatible with the NG with AI. But, there are probably others as well, eh? I have a lot of research to do for the next few days.

Thanks for any input.

Nokia uses FreeBSD as the base OS for CheckPoint. I hear that there is an OS image of some flavor of Linux which you can install the ISO and put CheckPoint on top of that. I was actually under the impression that this is what you got with just the CheckPoint software (an OS image to install on, I think it can install on Linux, Solaris, and Win2K?).

I don't think it would be substantially different than upgrading CheckPoint on a Nokia box, as long as you have the documentation. Then again, I've never done it.

By the way, this type of question would be perfect for the Security Focus mailing list for Firewalls.