GCIH Laptop question

kbpatil

I am attending SANS GCIH course in couple of weeks and little bit confused with which laptop to take. I have my personal Macbook pro and also company windows laptop. I am tending to take macbook as i am used to playing with virtualbox on it and its restriction free. Please share any issues you had during the course related to VM or Macbook compatibility or anything else.

Thanks in advance.

cyberguypr

Half of my SEC504 class was using Mac. I didn't see/hear anyone complaining. Keep in mind the Mac requirements:

If you are using a Macbook or Macbook Pro with OS X 10.8 or later, you will need VMWare Fusion 5.0 or later.

VirtualBox is not supported and may interfere with our labs. It should not be installed on a system you are planning to use for this class.

Forgot to mention: I highly recommend going with a freshly formatted machine and wiping it right after the training.

iBrokeIT

You should start by going here and reading the laptop requirements: https://www.sans.org/course/hacker-techniques-exploits-incident-handling

It specifically says VirtualBox is not supported and you will need to use VMware Fusion if you take your Macbook Pro.

I would advise against taking your company machine since the security policies and AV may get in your way.

kbpatil

I did read those and watched the video created by John Strand. I will surely bring VMware fusion with me for this class. I felt its always better to take suggestion from people who have attended the class before.

E Double U

iBrokeIT wrote: »

I would advise against taking your company machine since the security policies and AV may get in your way.

I learned this the hard way.

EngRob

Mac Parallels works just fine too. I've always used that for SANS and it always seems to function superbly.

matai

Just finished the class. I used Win8.1 with VMware Workstation 10 and had no problems. I probably a third of the class was using Macs, I had to assist a few with the network setup, that seemed to trip up a lot of people on both Windows and Mac. Whatever setup you go with, I suggest playing around with the network settings so that the host and VM and ping back and forth, or two VM's if that's the case. I was really surprised how many people were hung up on that.