300-710 SNCF Deployment — 10 Questions

Question 1

An administrator is troubleshooting a Stateful High Availability (HA) pair of Cisco Secure Firewall 4100 series devices managed by FMC. The units are failing to form an HA state, and logs indicate a state mismatch on the control link. Which underlying cause is most likely preventing the HA synchronization?

Choose an answer to begin — your selection is scored in the full session.

Accepted Answer

One unit is running a slightly different maintenance patch release of FTD than its peer.. Firewall High Availability requires identical hardware models, identical interface counts/types, matching deployment modes (routed/transparent), and identical software/patch versions.

Answer

The MTU on the data interfaces differs by 4 bytes.

Answer

The stateful HA control link is configured across a routed switch interface instead of a direct cross-over cable.

Answer

The management IP addresses on the active and standby units are identical.

Question 2

An engineer is configuring static route tracking on a Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense to ensure high availability for outbound internet connectivity. A backup static route is configured with a higher metric. What mechanism does the firewall use to dynamically switch from the primary route to the backup route when the primary next-hop fails?

Accepted Answer

Bidirectional Forwarding Detection (BFD) or ICMP ping SLA trackers that monitor the next-hop IP.. Static route tracking utilizes Embedded Event Manager (EEM) or IP SLA monitoring (via ICMP/TCP probes) to track reachability, modifying the routing table dynamically when the probe fails.

Answer

STP topology change notifications received on the tracked interface.

Answer

FMC heartbeat loss detection between the firewall and the gateway.

Answer

Automatic generation of dynamic OSPF neighbor adjacencies over the static interface.

Question 3

You are deploying a Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense in an existing core network as an out-of-band intrusion prevention system. Which NGIPS deployment mode should you configure to ensure the firewall performs deep packet inspection and generates alerts without dropping any production traffic in the event of a device failure or high load?

Accepted Answer

Passive deployment mode using a SPAN or tap source. Passive mode listens to a mirrored traffic stream (e.g., via SPAN or TAP). It analyzes copies of packets and cannot drop live production traffic.

Answer

Transparent mode with inline bypass enabled

Answer

Inline deployment mode with fail-open enabled

Answer

Routed mode with asymmetric routing tolerance

Question 4

You are configuring an active/standby High Availability pair for Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense using FMC. You need to configure port channels for the data interfaces to increase bandwidth and redundancy. Which guideline must be followed regarding port channels in an HA deployment?

Accepted Answer

The port channel interfaces on both the primary and secondary units must have identical interface IDs and member port compositions.. Port channel configurations (EtherChannels) must be identically configured on both the active and standby units. The physical member ports must match across both firewalls.

Answer

LACP active mode is unsupported on HA secondary units; static port channels must be used instead.

Answer

Port channels are restricted to transparent mode HA configurations only.

Answer

Port channels can only be configured on the active unit; the standby unit automatically inherits them via stateful sync.

Question 5

An engineer has deployed a Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense in transparent firewall mode. Users on the inside segment report they cannot reach a server on the outside segment. The engineer verifies that the BVI (Bridge Virtual Interface) has an IP address in the same subnet as the internal hosts and default gateway. What is a likely reason for traffic being dropped?

Accepted Answer

An EtherType access list is blocking the encapsulated traffic or ARP requests between the bridge groups.. In transparent mode, non-IP traffic is dropped by default unless EtherType rules are explicitly configured to allow protocols like BPDUs, MPLS, or IPX through the firewall bridge groups.

Answer

An explicit Access Control Policy rule is blocking the traffic, because transparent mode inspections still require standard ACP rules.

Answer

The security zones for the inside and outside interfaces are identical, causing an implicit intra-zone drop.

Answer

Dynamic routing protocols must be enabled on the BVI to advertise the transparent subnet upstream.

Question 6

An enterprise network design incorporates Equal-Cost Multi-Path (ECMP) routing across two Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense units functioning independently in routed mode. What is the primary benefit of enabling ECMP on the firewalls?

Accepted Answer

It enables the firewall to balance outbound traffic across multiple next-hop gateways using multiple equal-cost routes.. ECMP allows the firewall to install multiple equal-cost paths to the same destination in its routing table, distributing traffic across multiple next-hop routers for load balancing and redundancy.

Answer

It allows passive NGIPS interfaces to share inspection load without SPAN replication.

Answer

It pools the CPU and memory resources of both firewalls into a single logical cluster.

Answer

It synchronizes connection state tables across both independent firewalls for zero-loss failover.

Question 7

An administrator is configuring a new Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense in routed mode on Firepower Device Manager (FDM). During the initial setup, the administrator needs to define the routing behavior for a multi-zone deployment. Which configuration step is mandatory when setting up routed mode?

Accepted Answer

Assign a unique Layer 3 IP address to each data interface and associate it with a security zone.. In routed mode, every interface must belong to a security zone and possess an IP address. Routed mode operates as a Layer 3 hop, unlike transparent mode which operates at Layer 2.

Answer

Disable the Snort inspection engine on all interfaces to allow bridging.

Answer

Assign a unique MAC address override to every physical interface.

Answer

Create a BVI (Bridge Virtual Interface) for each pair of physical interfaces.

Question 8

An administrator is configuring an inline interface pair on a Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense device using Cisco FMC. The business requires that if the firewall experiences a power failure or kernel panic, traffic must continue to flow uninterrupted through the network segment. Which action should the administrator take?

Accepted Answer

Configure the inline set with the 'Fail Open' setting and ensure hardware bypass is supported and enabled on the network module.. Hardware bypass capability (fail-open) on supported Network Interface Modules (NIMs/SMs) allows physical optical or copper paths to bridge automatically when power is lost or the Snort engine crashes.

Answer

Set up a redundant EtherChannel with LACP fast-rate timers.

Answer

Deploy the interfaces in a Bridge Virtual Interface (BVI) group with spanning tree disabled.

Answer

Configure the inline set with the 'Fail Close' setting and enable STP root guard.

Question 9

An engineer is deploying a Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense Virtual (FTDv) instance in an Amazon Web Services (AWS) VPC. The deployment requires the FTDv to inspect traffic crossing between public and private subnets. Which AWS architectural construct is mandatory for routing traffic through the FTDv instance?

Accepted Answer

Custom AWS Route Tables associated with the subnets, pointing traffic destined outside the VPC to the FTDv data interface ENI.. In public cloud deployments like AWS, routing traffic through a firewall appliance requires updating AWS Route Tables to point default or specific subnet traffic to the Elastic Network Interface (ENI) of the firewall's internal/external interfaces.

Answer

Cisco TrustSec Security Group Tags (SGTs) applied to AWS security groups.

Answer

AWS Transit Gateway with static BGP peering enabled to the FTDv management interface.

Answer

Physical bypass NICs installed in the AWS hypervisor layer.

Question 10

When registering a new Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense device to Cisco Defense Orchestrator (CDO) or Cisco FMC, what is the primary prerequisite protocol or connectivity requirement that must be established from the managed device toward the management platform?

Accepted Answer

Outbound TCP connection on port 8305 from the FTD to the manager's IP address or registration FQDN.. Managed devices initiate outbound secure communication (typically over TCP port 8305 / sftunnel) to the management platform (FMC or CDO).

Answer

An active SNMPv3 trap receiver configured on the manager pointing to the FTD.

Answer

Inbound SSH access from the management platform IP address to the firewall management interface.

Answer

An IPSec site-to-site VPN tunnel terminating on the data interfaces.