Friday, 31 January 2014

Q&A: Do FortiFones come with power supplies?

Today I had a customer ask if the FortiFone 560i comes with a power adapter since there's no mention of it on the price-list. There is also no mention of a power adapter being supplied in the 'Quick Start Guide' either.

To clarrify, all x60i phones (260i, 360i, 460i, 560i) come with a power supply included in the box.

They all support PoE except for the 260i which can only run on the power supply.

Wednesday, 22 January 2014

How-to: Create an interface usage report on a FortiAnalyzer

This quick how-to guide will go through creating a chart/report on a FortiAnalyzer to show the upload, download and total data transfers for interfaces on a FortiGate.

This config is done a FortiAnalyzer running 5.0.5.

***Updated with new CASE selector***

Friday, 10 January 2014

How-to: Automate FortiGate configuration backups

The FortiGates don't have any backup automation abilities out of the box. Generally you'd use a FortiManager for the config, backup and control of multiple FortiGates.

I've recently setup a lab with several FortiGates for testing and wanted a simple way of backing up the configs every day so I could always revert back to a previous day quickly.

You could just backup the config before making changes, but I wanted to automate this process. Below is a quick and dirty script to automate the config backup.

A few notes to begin with; this script requires a read only user to be created on each FortiGate that have the same password. These passwords are stored in the script itself; so while it never gets transmitted in cleartext over the link, be aware that it is stored in the file. Since this is a lab and it's a readonly account I'm not too fussed. Another thing to note is that the strict host check for the SSH keys has been disabled (so you don't get a confirmation request for new IP addresses). There is a more secure way to do this without using passwords but ssh keys which I may create a blog on at a latter date.

The only dependency is that the script requires sshpass to be installed.

My guide goes through setting this all up on a Debian based Linux system (like Mint or Ubuntu). It should be fine to work on other distributions with few command changes.