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)

Chapter 5. Troubleshooting

As seen earlier in Chapter 1, First Steps, a FortiGate unit is a UTM device. However, we also know that the appliance, in addition to the security features, has comprehensive capabilities for VLAN management, routing, VPNs, and high availability. Troubleshooting a FortiGate requires a structured approach to locate which one of the different levels or features is triggering the problem. To make the explanation easier, we will divide troubleshooting into five general areas:

  • Routing

  • Security policies and profiles

  • Virtual domains

  • VPN

  • High Availability

In this chapter we will focus on diagnostic tools that are (for the most part) based on the CLI. To troubleshoot the aforementioned five areas, we will start from a group of tools dedicated to hardware diagnostics, then we will see a group of commands to identify errors related to layers 2 and 3 of the TCP/IP stack and a group of diagnostic controls focused on the higher level features.