First day at work!

Congratulations, you just arrived at your new networking security job! Today we start a very interesting journey and just as every good story we start very small. In this chapter we'll go over some initial steps that you should do once you've just unboxed your shiny new FortiGate and need to put the network up as soon as possible.

Keep in mind that we go over some config steps without doing all considerations (as is usually the case on real world scenarios) and due to that sometimes we may not configure some things in the best or optimal way in the first time, but do not worry because as our knowledge increases over the book we should also fix those issues until the end of our journey.

Turn it on

Ok, in your desk you have this small, beautiful little white box and just after turning it on you can see some leds blinking which gives you the impression that everything is working, then you connect a network cable and access the device both by HTTPS and SSH (usually in the IP 192.168.1.99), then login using the user admin and nothing (as in blank, nada) as the password. You're in.

FGVM020000000000 #

Basic Management Config

Now you start thinking about some basic management stuff that you'll need to configure no matter the initial network configuration that your boss is going to ask to, here's what you remember from the top of your head:

• Change admin password (Top priority!)
• Hostname
• Admin session timeout
• Update firmware
• Check licensing and security updates

After planning the initial steps, also start to plan what you need to do until the end of the day to have the network up and running, after you receive the network diagram specifications.

Basic Network Config

You know that in a few moments you'll receive more info on this subject and after you have that information here's what you plan to configure:

• Network interfaces (physical interfaces and VLANs)
• Static routing
• Source NAT