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)

FortiGate Session Life Support Protocol


FortiGate Session Life Support Protocol (FGSP) is used for traffic redundancy if a load balancer is already present in our network. Load balancing and session failover is done by the external balancer while two FortiGate units are integrated with it, to keep session synchronization (in a session table). TCP sessions (by default) and connectionless protocols like UDP and ICMP sessions (with an additional configuration) are able to failover from a unit to the other one with no data loss. Depending on the configuration of the balancer, all the network packets are sent to the primary unit and are directed to the secondary unit in case of a failure (like in the Active-Passive clusters) or the workload is balanced on both units (like in the Active-Active clusters). The configuration of the cluster units is not synchronized by default (this behavior can be modified). A basic schema of an FGSP cluster is shown as follows:

Note

The session synchronization link...