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novasam
New Member
October 7, 2014
Question

How are Host Names of Devices Decided?

  • October 7, 2014
  • 2 replies
  • 8365 views
We just deployed 4 FortiGate 800C, and everything is working great, but I noticed one issue. most devices all have the same host name on our device in logs and reports. It happens to be one of our monitoring servers. So I would like to learn how Fortigates decide on the host name of a device? This might help me troubleshoot and submit the changes needed to get our reports in order.

    2 replies

    FatalHalt
    New Member
    October 8, 2014
    You can set the hostname of the device to whatever you would like. This will allow them to all have individual hostnames and be able to be quickly recognized at a glance. config system global set hostname " desired name" end There' s a lot of different ways you could name them. Make it something that defines the device and lets you know what it is.
    neonbit
    New Member
    October 8, 2014
    Hi Paul, I' ve ran into the same issue at a customer network the other day. The MAC addresses were showing up correctly, but all the hostnames were from a wifi controller device in the network. Unfortunately the admin guide doesn' t have much information on this (http://docs.fortinet.com/uploaded/files/1946/fortigate-managing-devices-52.pdf). Would love it if someone has some details on how the hostname is derived exactly. From memory (on a general theme) the FortiGates look at the DHCP VCI (Vendor Class Identifier) if it can see DHCP traffic. It also looks at the TCP SYN packets and the HTTP UserAgent packets to determine some of its info.
    jim3cantos
    Explorer
    February 17, 2017

    Still same problem here in a FGT100D with fw v5.2.10. 

     

    Did anybody found a solution for this? I think it is not only a visualization issue in the logs, but also blocking MAC addresses doesn't seem to work because of this.