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)

Base system diagnostics


The status screen in the web-based manager includes a high level overview of information such as the system time (that is important, for example, to have coherent error messages and log recording), CPU and memory usage, license information, and alerts, as we can see in the following screenshot:

Although this screen is useful for a rapid assessment of the situation, our diagnostic tools usually have to dig deeper. The first base command we will use in the CLI is get system. This command can open more than eighty information options, dedicated to the different features of the FortiGate units. Among the others, we are able to check counters related to performance, such as:

  • Startup configuration errors with the get system startup-error-log command.

  • Firewall traffic statistics related to the traffic with the get system performance firewall statistics command.

  • Firewall packet distribution statistics with the get system performance firewall packet-distribution command.

  • Information...