These days, I have had to configure and monitor some Fortigate equipment, most of it is done via GUI, but it is necessary and practical to use the command line from time to time. The big surprise is that its commands are very different from what I am used to; for that reason, I propose to bring you a few articles with the most basic and necessary commands to use in a Fortigate.
Here we will start with two simple commands, the first is “get system status”. This command displays firmware version, serial number, BIOS version, machine name, virus and IPS database version, the current HA status, general information about VDOMS, its operation mode (NAT/Transparent), time, and date, among others.
Example:
FortiGate # get system status
Version: FortiGate-3240C v5.0,build0318,150515 (GA Patch 12)
Virus-DB: 51.00432(2017-09-04 07:11)
Extended DB: 25.00078(2015-03-17 20:07)
Extreme DB: 1.00000(2012-10-17 15:47)
IPS-DB: 11.00214(2017-09-01 02:22)
IPS-ETDB: 0.00000(2001-01-01 00:00)
Serial-Number: FG3K2ABZ14A10S93
Botnet DB: 4.00039(2017-09-01 10:00)
BIOS version: 04000007
System Part-Number: P10590-05
Log hard disk: Available
Hostname: FortiGate
Operation Mode: NAT
Current virtual domain: root
Max number of virtual domains: 10
Virtual domains status: 1 in NAT mode, 0 in TP mode
Virtual domain configuration: disable
FIPS-CC mode: disable
Current HA mode: a-a, master
Branch point: 318
Release Version Information: GA Patch 12
FortiOS x86-64: Yes
System time: Mon Sep 4 11:28:12 2017
FortiGate #
The command “get hardware status” provides information about the FortiGate unit’s hardware, such as FortiASIC version, CPU type, amount of RAM, flash drive size, hard drive size, USB flash drive size, and network card chipset and WiFi chipset (FortiWifi models). This information can be helpful for troubleshooting, providing information about your FortiGate unit.
Example:
FortiGate # get hardware status
Model name: FortiGate-3240C
ASIC version: CP8
ASIC SRAM: 64M
CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5620 @ 2.40GHz
Number of CPUs: 16
RAM: 11970 MB
Compact Flash: 7669 MB /dev/sdb
Hard disk: 57241 MB /dev/sda
USB Flash: not available
Network Card chipset: Broadcom 570x Tigon3 Ethernet Adapter (rev.0x5717100)
Network Card chipset: FortiASIC NP4 Adapter (rev.1)
FortiGate #
With the two previous commands, at least we already know our box’s hardware and software characteristics.
