firewall

How to restart a slave FortiGate firewall in an HA cluster

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Here’s a quick how-to on restarting a specific member of a High Availability FortiGate hardware firewall cluster. I have only tested this on a cluster of FG60 units, but am quite sure the steps would be similar for a cluster of FG100s, FG310s etc…

get-ha-status

First of all you may or may not want to set up some monitoring going to your various WAN connections on the HA cluster. Restarting the slave unit should not have any effect on these connections in theory as your master unit is the one handling all the work. The slave is merely there to take over should things go pear shaped on the master unit. When the slave restarts you can watch your ping statistics or other connections just to ensure everything stays up whilst it reboots.

1. Start by logging in to the web interface of your firewall cluster. https://ipaddress

2. Specify a custom port number if you have the management GUI on a custom port for example https://ipaddress:555

3. Login and look for “HA status” under the status area – this should be the default page that loads. It should show as “Active-passive” if this is the mode your HA cluster is in. Click the [Configure] link next to this.

4. This will give you an overview of your HA cluster – you can view which unit is the Master and which is the slave. This step is optional and just gives you a nice overview of how things are looking at the moment. Click “View HA statistics” near the top right if you would like to view each unit’s CPU/Memory usage and other statistics.

5. Return to the “Status” home page of your firewall GUI. Click in the “CLI Console” black window area to get to your console. (Optionally, you could also just SSH in if you have this enabled).

6. Type the following command to bring up your HA cluster details: get system ha status

7. This will show which firewall is master and slave in the cluster e.g.

Master:129 FG60-1 FWF60Bxxxxxxxx65 1
Slave :125 FG60-2 FWF60Bxxxxxxxx06 0

Look for the number right at the end and note this down. In the above example the Slave unit has the number “0” . Note this down.

8. Next enter the following command: execute ha manage x

Where “x” is the number noted down in step number 7.

This will change your management console to this particular firewall unit. i.e. the slave unit in our case. You should notice your command line change to reflect the name of the newly selected HA member.

9. Enter the following command to reboot the slave: execute reboot

10. Press “Y” to confirm and reboot the slave.

Monitor your ping / connection statistics to ensure everything looks fine. Give it a minute or so to boot up again, then return to your HA statistics page to ensure everything looks good.

That is all there is to it.

Symantec System Center 10.1 not pushing out license files or definition updates

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Today I had the issue whereby System Center would not update license files (.slf) for client PCs for a group in the console.

I could add the .slf on the server directly, but could not add it for each client PC. I could also not send virus definition updates to each client either, as the licenses had expired.

Anyway, it turns out that the Windows Firewall in XP for each of the clients was blocking these from going through. To resolve, just remotely manage the PC in question from the Computer Management console (Right-click My Computer, select Manage). Then click Action – Connect to another Computer. Type in the PC name and click Ok.

Once connected, browse to the services section, find the Windows Firewall / ICS service and right-click it. Select Disable from the menu.

disable-firewall

Now that the Windows Firewall is disabled, use the Symantec System Center console to push out the new license file for that PC in question, or a series of PCs.

install-licensefile

Once done, you can right click the selection of PC’s and update the virus definitions.

Be sure to turn the firewalls back on if you happen to use Windows Firewall / Internet connection sharing.