Book Image

Getting Started with FortiGate

Book Image

Getting Started with FortiGate

Overview of this book

FortiGate from Fortinet is a highly successful family of appliances enabled to manage routing and security on different layers, supporting dynamic protocols, IPSEC and VPN with SSL, application and user control, web contents and mail scanning, endpoint checks, and more, all in a single platform. The heart of the appliance is the FortiOS (FortiOS 5 is the latest release) which is able to unify a friendly web interface with a powerful command line to deliver high performance. FortiGate is able to give users the results they usually achieve at a fraction of the cost of what they would have to invest with other vendors.This practical, hands-on guide addresses all the tasks required to configure and manage a FortiGate unit in a logical order. The book starts with topics related to VLAN and routing (static and advanced) and then discusses in full the UTM features integrated in the appliance. The text explains SSL VPN and IPSEC VPN with all the required steps you need to deploy the aforementioned solutions. High availability and troubleshooting techniques are also explained in the last two chapters of the book.This concise, example-oriented book explores all the concepts you need to administer a FortiGate unit. You will begin by covering the basic tools required to administer a FortiGate unit, including NAT, routing, and VLANs. You will then be guided through the concepts of firewalling, UTM inside the appliance, tunnelling using SSL, and IPSEC and dial-up configurations. Next, you will get acquainted with important topics like high availability and Vdoms. Finally, you will end the book with an overview of troubleshooting tools and techniques.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Firewall features


The primary use of a FortiGate unit is to protect our networks from attacks with its firewall features. The security policies will define the allowed network traffic. Now, let's us take a look at a set of base objects that we will use to create and manage the policies.

Interfaces and zones

We have talked about interfaces in Chapter 1, First Steps. The firewall is able to operate both on physical and on virtual interfaces, including wireless interfaces, VLANS, and Virtual Domain (VDOM) links.

Note

VDOMs are a logical division of a single FortiGate unit into two or more virtual units that are independent from each other. We will talk about them in Chapter 4, High Availability.

There is a firewall interface that will receive the network traffic and an interface from which the aforementioned traffic will flow out of the device. We are able to establish a "direction" in which data is moving. This is the basic type of firewall control, and we can combine multiple interfaces (including...