FortiGate Tutorial

FortiGate Introuduction

This Fortigate Tutorial is aimed at teaching you the fundamentals of Dealing with ForiGate devices, not that very advanced and complicated tasks, that might be covered later, but the main tasks that you will need to know to get your device configured and serve your needs in your environment.

What are the basic tasks that FortiGate can Provide:

1-      Filteration: Fortigate main rule that’s being used every day on daily basis is filtering websites. Those websites are categorized based on their main purpose, for example Social Networking (Twitter, Facebook , Google+,…..etc ). Another well know Category is Bandwidth Consuming which includes most of the websites that can eat or consume your internet bandwith (Youtube, SoundCloud, DailyMotion….) and so on. There are two kind of Filtration, Web Filter and App Filter, the latter one is used to control and some application traffics on your network such as Torrent Software, Messaging, VPN Proxy Applications, and so on…we will discuss that section in details when we come to Filtration Part.

2-      Firewall: It’s main function is to stand against and stop any intrusion attempt to hack into your environment, by providing a high level security in many different ways, like the Built in Antivirus that Automatically scans traffic,  Intrusion Prevention, and some other manual way you can use to empower your security. Plus the AnitSpam, DLP, and Vulnurabilty Scan.

3-      Publishing:  One of the greatest feature in Forti which is used to Publish Exchange Server, Webserver, or RDP connection to internal server.

4-      VPN connection: FortiGate Provides  two types of VPN. SSL-VPN and Site To Site VPN. FYI: There’s an easy wizard step by step configuration page to configure both VPN types, but the good news is that we can use make Site TO Site VPN Tunnel Between Forti and other different Vendor Like Cyberoam, Cisco,….etc)

5-      Load Balancing: It’s a wonderful feature that lets you use more than one internet connection at the same time, so if one is down you still have internet access available for your servers and users with no down time. It worth mentioning that FortiGate gives you the ability to use each interface as a separate port which can be configured as extra WAN port or Switch port, depending on your own needs. So in some cases you might have up to 9 wans ports…or even more!!!

6-      VDOM: Making your device act as more than one. Multiplying…..or to be more accurate it’s a Virtualization concept that makes fortigate act as many Virtual Fortigate and each one of them is configured and assigned it’s own port in a separate way.

Those are most of the features that you need to know about and use in daily tasks.