Fortigate Initial Installation Settings

Fortigate Firewall Setup

In this article called Fortigate firewall initial setup, we will examine the initial setup process in Fortigate firewall devices. I will talk about the main processes you need to do when you buy a new Fortinet device or when you want to return the existing firewall device to factory settings and configure it from the beginning.

First of all, screw your device to the cabinet and after the installation process is finished, plug in the power cable and turn it on. With the help of a console cable, connect with telnet from the console. Enter admin as username and leave the password blank.

First, let’s assign a password to the admin user for security policy. Here it is;

config system admin >edit admin >set password 123456 >end

Then we will define GateWay ip to any interface in order to access the device from the web-based interface. After determining the interface number, that is, the port to which we will connect our computer, we will make the following definitions from the console. Let port1 be the interface we chose.

config system interface
edit port1
set ip 10.0.0.1 255.255.255.0
set allowaccess ping https
set ipmac enable
set type physical
set alias "misafir"

After making these settings, you can leave the console, connect our computer to the port1 port of the firewall device, type https://10.0.0.1 from Internet Explorer and make your settings over the web.

You can Restore the Backup file you have previously received. Here I will share a problem I encountered during the first installation phase of Fortigate Firewall.

The 224B model firewall failed and RZK replaced it with a new one of the same model under warranty. When the new device arrived, I applied the above settings, but when I uploaded the old backup file, I encountered a small problem.

Since the MAC addresses of the interfaces in the backup I took from the old device did not match the interface macs of the new device, I deleted the old mac addresses and then fortigate assigned the new interface mac addresses. Otherwise, the VLAN or WAN configuration you created on that interface will not work. Do not overlook this small detail.