How-to: Use the grep command on a FortiGate

Grep is a fast and easy way of filtering lots of information from the console. The FortiGate allows you to pipe grep to many commands including show, get and diagnose.

To use grep you must pipe it with the search value after a command ex: | grep <value>

There are a few options available with grep that can be seen with the -h flag. Below is a show command that's been piped with grep to display all the options available:

gate1 # show | grep -h
Usage: grep [-invfcABC] PATTERN
Options:
        -i      Ignore case distinctions
        -n      Print line number with output lines
        -v      Select non-matching lines
        -f      Print fortinet config context
        -c      Only print count of matching lines
        -A      Print NUM lines of trailing context
        -B      Print NUM lines of leading context
        -C      Print NUM lines of output context

How-to: Configure Quotas by Data Usage on a FortiGate

Long ago, you had two options when it came to usage quotas on the FortiGate; it was either based on data usage, or time usage. Fortinet then decided to remove the data usage quota and only have time based ones available. Recently Fortinet have decided to reintroduce the data based quotas (albeit it can only be configured via the CLI).

We'll go through creating a data usage quota on a web filtering profile, and some things you should know.

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.