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.

Fortigate ‘HA’ configuration explained

Last month I wrote a blog post about HA on the ASA. Today, I am writting one on Fortigate HA.…

By Manny Fernandez

March 12, 2018

How DHCP v4 really works

If you ask people how DHCP works, most people will think that a computer gets connected to the network and…

By Manny Fernandez

March 12, 2018

ASA ‘HA’ configuration explained

When configuring the Cisco ASA for High Availability, the failover command is used to configure the devices. A few terms…

By Manny Fernandez

February 27, 2018

Upgrading My 2FA Foo

Today I updated any account I could find that uses 2FA. I chose Authy since it allows me to backup…

By Manny Fernandez

February 13, 2018

Negate Source, Destination or Service

I started working on Firewalls back in the early 90’s. I started on Checkpoint Firewall-1 running on AIX. I soon…

By Manny Fernandez

February 4, 2018

SIP Application Layer Gateway – Cisco and Fortinet

SIP ALG is a feature where the firewall will inspect the SIP packets as they egresses the firewall Purpose of…

By Manny Fernandez

January 23, 2018

Fortigate CLI Tips and Tricks

I am a CLI guy. Make no mistake, I like the GUI but at the end of the day, I…

By Manny Fernandez

December 12, 2017

Syslog Server running ‘rsyslog’

Although I run FortiSIEM on my home lab, I wanted to have a quick & dirty, low cost, simple solution…

By Manny Fernandez

December 7, 2017

Forticloud 3.2 for APs

Fortinet’s FortiCloud was introduced to provide customers the ability to manage their device entirely from the cloud. This post will…

By Manny Fernandez

December 2, 2017

IKEv1 & IKEv2

I have been dealing with VPNs for the past 20 Years. Primarily I have used IKEv1 as it was the…

By Manny Fernandez

December 1, 2017

Stepping Up My Dongle Foo

Last night I was presenting at a local ISSA meeting. When I arrived, my POS (Not Point of Sale) USB…

By Manny Fernandez

November 17, 2017

VI Cheat Sheet

Here is a simple VI cheat sheet. I like ‘vi’ because it is pretty much included by default in everything.…

By Manny Fernandez

November 14, 2017

Reformatting MAC addresses in Excel

Today, a customer asked me to add his 150 phone’s MAC address to their MAB Bypass database they use for…

By Manny Fernandez

November 3, 2017

Upgrading Observium Community Edition

Observium is an amazing quasi-opensource solution used to monitor up/down and performance of your networks. It allows you to monitor…

By Manny Fernandez

November 2, 2017

Configuring FortiAnalyzer Mail Settings for STARTTLS

When configuring your FortiAuthenticator for email alerts, there is no section in the GUI to enable/disable STARTTLS. However as most…

By Manny Fernandez

October 31, 2017

Upgrading FortiSIEM from 4.9 to 4.10

You will need: • Internet access • SSH or Console Access to the FortiSIEM VM • A licensed 4.9 FortiSIEM…

By Manny Fernandez

October 24, 2017

My SecureCRT Tweaks

I love SecureCRT by Van Dyke Software. I used it when I was running Windows as my main desktop, then…

By Manny Fernandez

September 20, 2017

HSRP Using SLA with Boolean Tracks

Recently, I was at a cutomer’s location that wanted to track an ISP based on multiple locations (e.g. 4.2.2.2 and…

By Manny Fernandez

May 24, 2017

Windows Logging Cheat

Yesterday, I attaended Hack Miami Con and had a great time. Met Michael Gough of Log-MD. He gave the keynote…

By Manny Fernandez

May 21, 2017

Data Breaches – April 2017

HealthNow Networks Date of Breach: Unknown – Exposed for Many Months Date Made Public: April 10, 2017 Records Affected: 918,000…

By Manny Fernandez

April 26, 2017

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