How-to: Configure User Alias Options on a FortiMail

If your organisation is using aliases, it's generally a good idea to configure the 'User Alias Options' within the LDAP settings to ensure users only get one quarantine email for all their addresses, instead of one for each alias address.

To configure this, first edit the LDAP profile you've configured for your domain (found under Profile > LDAP) and expand the 'User Alias Options' section.

Ensure the tickbox has been enabled next-to 'User Alias Options', then configure your base DN, Bind DN and Bind password as normal. For the 'Alias member query' option use proxyAddresses=smtp:$m. Lastly untick the 'User group expansion in advance' box.

Your final configuration should look something like this:

To test this out click on the 'Test LDAP Query...' link near the top of the LDAP profile page. From here choose 'Alias' from the dropdown menu and type in your email address at the bottom. For the below example my normal email address is amouawad@wglab.com.au and my alias is allan@wglab.com.au.

Click on 'Test' and you should see the alias match!

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.