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 guide breaks down the FortiGate debug commands … Read more
This guide puts the Meraki Dashboard API calls I use for branch rollouts in one place: create or clone a network, fix the VLAN subnet the clone brings with it, and update MX Layer 3 firewall rules without wiping the existing ones. Every script below is a template. The IDs, API key and subnets are … 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
Introcution to Web Filter Shadow IT used to mean someone spinning up an unapproved Dropbox account. These days it means half your org pasting internal docs into ChatGPT without a second thought. I get asked about this constantly right now — “can we even see who’s using AI tools, let alone stop it?” — and … Read more
Fortinet FortiASIC architecture utilizes proprietary, hardware-accelerated Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) rather than relying solely on general-purpose CPUs.