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Ted
Staff
Ted
Staff
May 26, 2026

Technical Tip: Device and Hostname containing Korean characters are displayed incorrectly

  • May 26, 2026
  • 0 replies
  • 34 views

Description

This article describes an issue where the hostname of an endpoint device is displayed incorrectly, such as text corruption or broken characters, on FortiGate when device detection is enabled and the Windows computer name contains Korean (non‑ASCII) characters encoded using CP949 / EUC‑KR.

Scope

FortiGate.

Solution

The issue is observed in multiple GUI components, such as Assets & Identities, Forward Traffic logs, and Device lists, where the hostname appears partially corrupted or replaced with invalid characters. The hostname of a Windows endpoint containing Korean characters (for example, DESKTOP-한글) is displayed incorrectly on FortiGate.

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The operating system and IP address are detected correctly, but the hostname field contains broken or unreadable characters. Example of an incorrect hostname displayed on FortiGate:

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FortiGate device detection relies on multiple name‑resolution mechanisms, including NetBIOS Name Service (NBNS), LLMNR, and mDNS. When the Windows computer name contains Korean characters:

  • NetBIOS transmits the hostname using CP949 / EUC‑KR encoding, which is not UTF‑8, then FortiGate interprets NBNS hostnames as UTF‑8.

  • As a result, Korean characters included in NBNS name queries cannot be decoded correctly, leading to hostname corruption.


Device List:


FGVM16TM00000000 # diagnose user device list
hosts
00:0c:29:30:d1:50 gen 17 scan on
created 350s gen 13 seen 272s port1 gen 6
ip 10.0.2.100 src arp
hardware vendor 'VMware' src mac id 0 weight 128
os 'Windows' src dhcp id 848 weight 128
software version '10 / 2016' src mwbs id 3331 weight 50
host 'DESKTOP-ѱ' src nbns


Packet capture:


1 14:19:09.376955 10.0.2.99 10.0.2.255 137 137 NBNS 110 Registration NB DESKTOP-<c7><d1><b1><db><20>
NetBIOS Name Service
Transaction ID: 0x9425
Flags: 0x2910, Opcode: Registration, Recursion desired, Broadcast
Questions: 1
Answer RRs: 0
Authority RRs: 0
Additional RRs: 1
Queries
Additional records
DESKTOP-<c7><d1><b1><db><20>: type NB, class IN
Name: DESKTOP-<c7><d1><b1><db><20> (Server service)
Type: NB (32)
Class: IN (1)
Time to live: 3 days, 11 hours, 20 minutes
Data length: 6
Name flags: 0x0000, ONT: B-node (B-node, unique)
Addr: 10.0.2.99


Due to protocol limitations, NetBIOS does not define Unicode or UTF‑8 encoding, which can result in hostname corruption.

LLMNR and mDNS are unaffected, as they use UTF‑8 by design. To avoid displaying corrupted hostnames, FortiGate will ignore NBNS hostname information when non‑ASCII characters are detected and rely on LLMNR for hostname learning.


The issue will be fixed in the following versions.

  • v7.6.7 (scheduled to release on May 21).

  • v8.0 (will be scheduled).

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