FG60B SHUTDOWN?

SYQUEST · ‎07-19-2009

I noticed that the FG60B has a shutdown mode. In the 1U Install Guide on page 10, it suggests you do a shutdown before turning the unit off. What is that all about? For one thing it says " to turn off the power switch" , except the FG60B has none! Is this really necessary? I have only run into this " shutdown" thing on one other company - MultiTech, but their firewall/router has a disk drive, so that is understandable. The FG60B does not. What kind of hardware problems could occur? What happens with a power failure? This should be interesting... ....JIM....

red_adair · ‎07-19-2009

I never shut down any FortiGate, nor did i run into Problems. There' s a fact though that FortiGate has a Compact Flash where it can write to. So naturally there is potential that you switch off while write-operations (config change, persistant logfiles, statistics, debuglog etc) happens and damage the fileformat on the flashdisk. In that case you have to physically (locally) access the Device with a serial cable, format the flash and re-write the Firmware. My understanding is that FortiOs is sort of resistent to these Problems - but the unforseen can happen any time ;) -R.

SYQUEST · ‎07-20-2009

Thanks for the input. What happens if you have a power failure? If it is a big deal, Fortinet sure does not have anything prominent about that fact in any of the documents I have read to date. I can understand that you should not pull the plug when you are updating or saving the config, but even on SOHO routers they caution one about not pulling the plug in those cases. What happens if the client pulls the plug? Also I don' t have any USB thumb drives or regular drives plugged into the FG60B. I really don' t want the client logging into the unit unless they were trained properly. I guess I will have to figure out a shutdown routine, if these is such a thing. ....JIM....

mhe · ‎07-20-2009

I never had any problems with small FG' s when power fails. If I' m logged on to the device and have to move them, I usually use the shutdown command to avoid problems... martin