Thursday 13 March 2014

How-to: Automatically revert a config on a FortiGate

There's nothing worse than remotely configuring a firewall and then loosing access once you've made your changes. Having a failsafe mechanism in place to revert to a previous config automatically will help you minimise potential issues and save you alot of stress! Luckily the FortiGate's give you a few options on how to save your running config which we'll discuss below.

Wednesday 5 March 2014

How-to: Configure SMS Two Factor Authentication on a FortiGate

A while ago I wrote a 'How-to' guide on the steps required to configure SMS Two Factor Authentication using a FortiAuthenticator and a FortiGate. This involved configuring the a SMS gateway on the FortiAuthenticator using HTTP and then getting the FortiGate to send authentication requests to it.

A little known fact is that the FortiGate can actually do two factor SMS authentication out of the box, all for free and with no licenses required! There's two ways of configuring the SMS authentication. Firstly with the prepaid FortiGuard SMS servers (preconfigured) and then with your own custom SMS server.

Ttoday I decided to test out this feature with my custom SMS server and initially struggled as there's no proper documentation on how it actually works, what it sends etc. Below are the steps I took and the bits of information that I gleamed during the configuration.