CheckMates Member of the Month for December 2017: Hugo van der Kooij

[PhoneBoy]

Check Point is proud to name its CheckMates Member of the Month for December 2017: https://community.checkpoint.com/people/HUGO.532b93a9-c5ea-3035-ab17-ef7c02036f40

An IT support engineer for 20 years, he’s seen versions of FireWall-1 from 3.0b on a variety of platforms to current releases. He still has to do the occasional midnight upgrade and has been known to come up with wild ideas that solve customer problems.

I’ve known Hugo for many years as he moderated my FireWall-1 Gurus mailing list during the 2000s. I’m personally grateful for both his past contributions and present contributions to CheckMates!

Hugo, tell us a little about yourself & what you do

I work for Qsight IT as support engineer for 20 years now. In that capacity, my first responsibility is to solve problems. But I also do the occasional midnight upgrades as we share those among our team of engineers.

Tell us a little about your experience with Check Point

I started off with Check Point version 3.0b on Solaris, mainly because I had been using Linux, Solaris, and various other flavors Unix at that time. I liked iPSO as well as it was a nice mix of hands-on Unix and a reasonably well-designed web interface to do most common tasks. I still like GAIA for that as it will allow people with lesser skills to manage most aspects through the web interface, yet still allow me to dig into whatever I need to find on the system with CLISH or BASH. Over time I have installed Check Point on just about every platform it was supported on. I admit installing it on Windows was only done at gun point 😉

Do you have a unique deployment of a Check Point product? 

Actually, the best trick so far was doing some inspect code with PhoneBoy to speed up email delivery. In the old days, email servers were probing over TCP/113 (IDENT). Until that session was timed-out would hold of the SMTP connection. We added some code to allow IDENT from server to client for 60 seconds whenever an SMTP or FTP connection was allowed. I still like to tinker with stuff like that.

What do you use the CheckMates platform for? 

I like CheckMates as a forum to learn of problems others are solving as well as the ability to contribute a wild idea and see what others think of it. Sharing code for tricks and getting feedback is also very useful.

What do you like to do for fun?

In my spare time, I like the occasional evening on the couch with my wife. These days, I am also involved in local politics so those moment are treasured. I also happen to hack in the kitchen. Just see what is around and manage to prepare a meal with it. The occasional Apple Pie I make is always appreciated by those I share it with.

If you could create any new technology right now, what would it be? 

Actually, I am a bit skeptical if any new technology will actually benefit us. But on the other hand, if I see someone create a technology to use CO to create building materials with far less energy than traditional concrete, I say we could use more of those.