Network & Security Blog

Fortigate Tutorial – Authentication

January 26th, 2012

admin

Fortigate Tutorial 4 – Authentication

The Fortigate aplience support different types of authentication.

Let’s discuss them here:

1. LDAP

Fortigate support all servers that are LDAP compliant. It supports up to LDAPv3

Also LDAP over SSL/TLS is supported. One downside of using LDAP is that the Fortinet firewall does not supply any information on why the user authentication failed. For the reason you must check the Server itself.

2. Local Users

You can define local users on the Fortigate itself, by defining a user name and a password for the user.

3. RADIUS

Radius is also supported on the Fortigate. For this you just define a RADIUS server and define the shared key between the RADIUS server and the FG.

Fortigate Tutorial – Fortiguard

January 26th, 2012

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Fortiguard Services

Fortinet provides a world wide coverage of Fortiguard sevices through the Fortiguard Serice Points. The communication between your FortiGate appliance and the Fortiguard Service Points is possibled on port UDP 53 but it can also be changed to port 8888.

Since Fortigate firewalls are placed all over the world, the use DNS so you can get the closest one to you.

The updates issued by Fortiguard can only be received on port UDP 9443, so be carefull to not have this port closed.

Caching is available for the following UTM appliances: Web-Filter and AntiSpam. This option is strongly recommeded as it imporves performance by reducing Fortigate unit registration to the Fortiguard service. The space that cache uses is only a small percentage of the System memory that the firewall can have.

In the situation that the cache is full, the oldest cache is deleted.

You also have a TTL option that controls the number of seconds to store the IPs and URLs that the Fortiguard service provides before contacting it again.

Fortigate Troubleshooting – DHCP

January 26th, 2012

admin

All of us have problems sometimes with DHCP, especially if we use the Fortigate it as a DHCP relay server.

The following commands are used to best troubleshoot the DHCP process:

#diag debug en
#diag debug console timestamp en

The following is used if we use IPSec DHCP relay
#diag debug app dhcprelay 7

The following is used if we are using IPsec DHCP Server
#diag debug app dhcps 7

Fortigate Tutorial – Logging and Alerts

January 26th, 2012

admin

Here is the 2nd Tutorial that i created, hope you enjoy this one too.

Logging and Alerts

Fortigate can store its logs in the following:

1. Local HDD – this option can be enabled from the CLI

2. FortiAnalyzer – this is my favorite. It is a device to which Fortigate sends all the logs and then you can create pretty reports.

This option can be enabled by providing the IP of the FortiAnalyzer(FA) or by using “Automatic Discovery”, but for the automatic discovery you will need to have the FA in the same subnet as the Fortigate.