Author Archives: Manny Fernandez

I have been in the networking and security field for over 27 years. I started working for resellers back in the Novell days. I obtained my CNE, Master CNE, GroupWise CNE and later moved on to Microsoft with the MCSE. I have obtained numerous industry certifications from Palo Alto, Cisco, Checkpoint, Juniper, RSA, Fortinet, Linux and other. I have worked on every firewall produced since the 1990's from Novell's Border Manager to IP Tables to FortiOS and everything in-between. I have either migrated to or from all of these platforms. It is my passion. I love what I do so I do not consider it work. Today I work for a manufacturer. By far, I enjoy this side much more so hope to continue doing so.

Configuring Multiple Fortigate Firewalls using USB

Use Case: You have multiple Fortigate Firewalls firewalls and you want to configure them pretty much the same execpt for…

By Manny Fernandez

November 20, 2018

TCP Timeout on Fortigate Firewall

Use Case: Municipality Customer. Has a Fire station app that runs through a Fortigate to a server behind the Fortigate.…

By Manny Fernandez

November 15, 2018

Fortigate 6300 – Assigning Services to a particular blade

  The Fortigate 6300 Is a massive platform with so much power, it can be used in multiple deployment methods;…

By Manny Fernandez

November 15, 2018

Configuration Confirmation on Fortigate

I am not a “Juniper guy" but I will say that their ‘commit confirm’ command is brilliant. Every engineer that…

By Manny Fernandez

November 14, 2018

Fortigate Web-content Overide

Use Case: You have web content profiles set up and a help desk that is fielding calls from unhappy users…

By Manny Fernandez

October 28, 2018

My Issues with Apple

Disclaimer: OK, so this is not an infosec post but wanted to share my experiences with those who follow this…

By Manny Fernandez

October 28, 2018

‘Diff’ Ways of Comparing Files

See what I did there? As a security engineer, I am always doing comparisons of files to see where things…

By Manny Fernandez

October 6, 2018

Fortigate HA Back-to-Back Gotchas

Recently, I had a customer that deployed two sets of HA Fortigates at two separate locations. Additionally, the customer had…

By Manny Fernandez

October 4, 2018

macOS Mojave and Home Brew

Since I switched Apple as my main computer, I was running Mac Ports https://www.macports.org/ However with the release of macOS…

By Manny Fernandez

October 2, 2018

BSides Miami 2018 Inaugural Conference

For years (4+) I have wanted to bring BSIdes to Miami. I had a long conversation with Jack Daniel regarding…

By Manny Fernandez

September 26, 2018

Removing computer name from my bash prompt

OK, I finally broke down and removed the computer name from my bash prompt. It is truly annoying and useless…

By Manny Fernandez

September 21, 2018

Basic FortiSwitch Set Up

I recieved a FortiSwitch 248E-FPOE switch for my lab. The initial config is very similar to the Fortigate you can…

By Manny Fernandez

September 3, 2018

IKEv2 Dynamic Remote Fortigate to Head-In ASA

Customer had a Cisco ASA 5516-X that we used to replace aging 5510’s. I told the customer that we would…

By Manny Fernandez

September 1, 2018

Wired Captive Portal with Fortigate

Use Case: Customer wanted to have their devices that are authenticated to AD, egress to the Internet without needing to…

By Manny Fernandez

August 31, 2018

Remote Access VPN with ASA as a client

Today I had a customer that was buying two Fortigate 500Es for their datacenter but had some remote offices outside…

By Manny Fernandez

May 22, 2018

External Resources FortiOS 6.0

FortiOS has implemented the long awaited feature of dynamic block lists from external sources such as DShield and others. There…

By Manny Fernandez

April 14, 2018

Fortigate SSL Decryption with Microsoft CA Server

This article has a prequel to it which shows how to deploy the CA server where this article assumes you…

By Manny Fernandez

April 10, 2018

10 Steps to Presenting Better

In my current job, I regularly present to customers using my computer. Sometimes this is on site, via a GoTo…

By Manny Fernandez

April 3, 2018

Making PopClip work in UltraEdit and SecureCRT

I use PopClip for Mac and it is such an awesome tool. What PopClip does: When you highlight some text,…

By Manny Fernandez

April 2, 2018

Command Line Password Generator

I run macOS High Sierra. When I need to generate a random password, I use an opensource package named pwgen​.…

By Manny Fernandez

April 2, 2018

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