Get started with Fortigate Firewall
Welcome to “Fortigate Admin Crash Course
Everything in this book is done on a virtual machine, which you can download at https://support.fortinet.com/
Here you will create a free account, once you set up your account, navigate to the Download section at the top bar and click on VM Images
You will find different virtual machines images, choose your VM platform, I use the VMware ESXi with my VMware fusion for Mac
Make sure that you download the correct image ( new deployment ) . the current version, at the time this book was written, is 6.4.4
The free version that you will download has some limitations, but it will do for most of our practices
Importing your VM
Importing the image to your VM platform and configuring your FortiGate depends on your OS of choice, we will do it using My Macbook, but the flow is very similar in windows
Go to File — Import and choose your Fortigate VM that you have just downloaded. The download is usually in ZIP, so you will have to extract it
The setup should take a few minutes
Once you finish the setup, you will see your VM summary. Press the Finish button, and your VM will start to load and Booting the Kernel
When that finishes, you will be prompt to enter your credentials Enter “admin” (lower case ) for the user name
And enter a password, you will be asked to re-enter it
The following are Command-line commands, that you don’t need to understand, for now, we will set up the interface that will connect us to the Management page through the browser
The IP address that you have just configured is a static one, make sure that it is in your home/office subnet , the one that you are connected to
The “set allowaccess” actually defines the protocols that you are allowed to connect through as an admin
Now open up your browser, using the address you have configured, and enter the credentials you have set up at the beginning ( admin, password )