What Is EVPN and VXLAN? A Practitioner’s Primer
Manny FernandezA vendor-neutral deep dive into the control plane and the data plane that modern overlay networks are built on.* Why...
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The Most Common USB Plugs and Their Names: A Practitioner’s Field Guide
Manny FernandezIf you have ever dug through a drawer full of cables trying to find the one that actually fits the...
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Know Your Plugs: A Practitioner’s Guide to Common AC Connectors
Manny FernandezIn this article, I will cover the basic AC plugs you are bound to run into. In "Know Your Plugs:...
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OSPF Primer: Message Types, Areas, and FortiGate Troubleshooting
Manny FernandezOSPF (Open Shortest Path First) is a link-state IGP that every network engineer eventually has to actually understand rather than...
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The Fortinet Support Tool: Installation and Use A practitioner guide to capturing GUI debug data for FortiCare tickets
Manny FernandezWhat the Fortinet Support Tool Actually Is There are two different things people mean when they say "Fortinet support tool,"...
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Deploying Cacti with NetFlow Support on Ubuntu Linux: Configuring Cisco, Fortinet and Juniper for Netflow
Manny FernandezA step-by-step deployment and configuration guide for building a Cacti monitoring server with the FlowView plugin for NetFlow, sFlow, and...
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Deploying NetFlow and sFlow on FortiGate (FortiOS 8.0) for Network Traffic Visibility with Cacti and FlowView
Manny Fernandez1. Title and Executive Summary Objective: This guide walks you through configuring both NetFlow v9 and sFlow v5 export on...
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Securing the Gate with Security Profiles Series: Web Rating Override and Web Profile Override on the FortiGate Firewall
Manny Fernandez1. The two features people keep confusing FortiOS ships two Web Filter capabilities whose names sound nearly identical but solve...
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FortiGate Threat Weight Tracking A practitioner guide to risk scoring, configuration, and tuning in FortiOS 7.x and 8.x
Manny Fernandez1. What Threat Weight Tracking Is Threat Weight (sometimes called Threat Weight Tracking or Client Reputation in older code) is...
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FortiGate Security Rating and Vulnerabilities Tab: A Practical Walkthrough
Manny Fernandez1. What Security Rating Actually Does Security Rating is a built-in posture assessment engine that runs on the root FortiGate of...
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Deploying Workflow Management on FortiGate: A practitioner deployment guide for policy change summaries, audit trails, and policy expiration
Manny FernandezWhat Workflow Management Actually Is On the FortiGate, "Workflow Management" is not an approval-routing engine. It is a System Settings...
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FortiGate WIDS: A Practical Deployment and Tuning Guide
Manny Fernandez1. High-Level Overview The FortiGate Wireless Intrusion Detection System (WIDS) is the radio-frequency monitoring engine built into the FortiGate wireless...
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MIMO, 2×2 vs 4×4, and WiFi Standards: A Technical “Shallow” Dive
Manny FernandezWhat MIMO Actually Does Multiple Input, Multiple Output (MIMO) is the technique of using more than one antenna at both...
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The FortiOS Commands the Admin Guide Forgot
Manny FernandezA practitioner's tour of the diagnose, test, and fnsysctl corners of FortiOS that never made it into the official documentation....
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FortiGate Firewall Scheduling Deployment Guide: How to configure and use Schedules
Manny FernandezOverview FortiGate firewall schedules control *when* a firewall policy is active. Every firewall policy references a schedule object, and by...
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The Complete Guide to Ethernet and Fiber Cabling: Categories, Uses, and Limitations
Manny FernandezCabling is the part of the network everyone forgets until it breaks. You can buy the fastest firewall and the...
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FortiGate Administrator Profiles: Access Control Reference
Manny FernandezOverview Administrator profiles (also called access profiles) are the role-based access control (RBAC) mechanism in FortiOS. A profile defines what...
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Disabling Auto Upgrade on FortiGate Firewalls
Manny FernandezLet me start by saying, if you do not have a mature patching mechanism where you are subscribed to the...
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Loomi: My First IOS App
Manny FernandezAt work, they wanted us to keep track of activity. I started doing the spreadsheet way. Found it clunky especially...
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FortiOS 8.0: Custom Tags, Dynamic Tag Address Groups, and Policy Tagging
Manny FernandezOverview FortiOS 8.0 introduces custom tags as a first-class organizational and operational construct across the firewall object model. Tags can...
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