Bhardwaj Vishnu
I keep coming back to this same set of commands every time an HA pair acts up, so I put them all in one place. When a FortiGate cluster fails to sync, a heartbeat link degrades, or you hit an unexpected failover, knowing the right command beats hunting through the GUI. Whether you’re chasing a … Read more
FortiGate debug commands Troubleshooting network connectivity and VPN tunnels on a FortiGate firewall can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack without the right visibility. Fortunately, FortiOS provides a powerful suite of CLI diagnostic tools to trace packets and dissect IKE negotiations in real time. This comprehensive guide breaks down essential FortiGate debug … Read more
Introduction Scaling an enterprise network isn’t just about buying more hardware — it’s about operational efficiency. When you’re rolling out dozens or hundreds of new branch locations, configuring each site by hand through the GUI wastes a huge amount of engineering time. Worse, manual data entry all but guarantees configuration drift and IP overlap eventually … Read more
Introduction Managing a handful of branch firewalls through the dashboard is fine. But once your network scales to dozens, hundreds, or thousands of locations, manual configuration becomes a liability. Clicking through the Meraki Dashboard to update one Layer 3 outbound firewall rule across 50 sites isn’t just tedious — it invites configuration drift, human error, … Read more
Introduction Deploying a single branch network is straightforward. But once you’re rolling out dozens or hundreds of remote sites, relying on manual GUI configuration turns into a serious operational bottleneck. One of the most common workflows I run into with Cisco Meraki is cloning a “Golden Template” network to spin up a new site quickly. … Read more
Introduction Rolling out a single branch office by hand through the dashboard is manageable. But once you’re deploying fifty, a hundred, or a thousand new sites, manual configuration turns into operational bottlenecks, configuration drift, and the occasional costly typo. That’s why I lean on Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and API-driven automation once you’re past a … Read more
When I moved from configuring Cisco Meraki networks manually through the GUI dashboard to automating deployments with the Meraki API, the very first wall I hit wasn’t authentication or rate limits — it was simply knowing which organization and network I was actually talking to. Before you can clone a site, push firewall rules, or … Read more
Introduction to FortiGate DHCP over IPsec VPN When you deploy a FortiGate Remote Access VPN (Dial-Up IPsec), the default and most heavily documented method for assigning IP addresses to remote clients is Mode Config. Mode Config is highly automated — it pushes virtual IP addresses, DNS server settings, and split-tunneling routes down to the FortiClient … Read more
FortiGate IPsec Remote Access VPN I set this up whenever remote employees need encrypted access into a corporate LAN without a fixed site-to-site link on the other end. Unlike a site-to-site tunnel, a remote access (dial-up) VPN accepts connections from client devices on unknown, changing public IPs — laptops on home Wi-Fi, hotel networks, mobile … Read more
INTRODUCTION If you have spent any time writing network automation scripts using Python libraries like Paramiko or Netmiko, you are intimately familiar with the primary pain point of legacy automation: CLI screen scraping. Parsing text-based CLI outputs breaks instantly the moment a vendor updates an operating system, adds a new column to a table, or … Read more