Future of Forticlientvpn ?

[Baard]

Hello! Does anyone know the future of " ForticlientVPN" ? I' m talking about the light-weight IPSEC vpn client without endpoint protection features. I find it really neat and functional, with a payload of only a couple of MB. I tried to ask support about this client, but they didn' t understand which vpn client I was talking about. The client is not available for download in version 5, and there is no way to tell if it' s dying with version 4 or not. For reference, this is the client I am referring to: ftp://pftpintl:F0rt1intl@support.fortinet.com/FortiClient/Windows/v4.00/4.0MR2/MR2_Patch_8/FortiClientVPN_4.2.8.0307_x64.zip

[vanc]

I believe the standalone VPN tool was discontinued since v4.3 for some reasons. Since you can install FortiClient with only the VPN feature, you won' t lose much.

[Computer_Magic]

The problem is you can' t even select what to install with the version 5 forticlient. Support told me to continue to use the 4.3 client for doing this. I think this is very short sighted and not a very good solution. I don' t think the version 4.3 client is supported on Windows 8. We will not use the Forticlient for our AV software so there is no reason to have that part installed. We were told if we want to use the 5 client that we could just disable the AV but then the icon shows an exclamation point which confuses our customers. It also installs another AV while even though it is not running can still cause problems in my experience.

[edwarneke]

This is also a huge issue for my company. We use a 3rd party AV solution and won' t be using the forticlient for anything but VPN access. This NEEDS to be a stand alone solution, or we need to be able to disable entirely or not install the other parts of forticlient. Does anyone know if the 4.3 vpn client will work with fortiOS 5.x?

[billp]

This is a problem for us, also. I used a 4.2 VPN client on Windows 8 and it connected fine. However, the stats regarding bytes transferred were grossly off -- it told me that I transferred about 4GB during my initial connection which was clearly wrong. I haven' t tried the 4.3 sslvpn client. I am running an informal trial of the new FortiClient. I found that the AV uses quite a bit of resources at startup and visibly slows down my older computers for about 2-3 minutes. After startup, though, it wasn' t bad. I don' t think I could broadly distribute it on my laptops without it causing complaints, though. There should be a clean way of just installing the VPN client or it will cause confusion.

[rsmayer]

I installed Forticlient 5.0.2 over MS Security essentials. During install it noticed and it allowed me to install with real-time av disabled. Also, 5.0.2 config allows to hide av, web filter, etc. from the ui. So via config you can disable all but vpn and hide all but vpn from the UI. Further, if you are pushing FCT configs from FGT, the FortiOS 5.0.2 web UI has control to allow you to enable/disable and/or show/hide the various FCT feature. So in the end you can install with av disabled, and when the client registers, you can push the rest of the desired config changes (i.e. disable and hide everything but VPN).

[Computer_Magic]

rsmayer What you are saying sounds great. Do you have some documentation on how to do these things? I would love to be able to give my clients a customized forticlient without all the extra stuff in it. I was just using the 5.0.2 client and it looks like they finally added the option to be able to save the password back in which is great. You need to turn that option on at the fortigate using 5.0.2 as well though. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[L_FTNT]

@edwarneke

Does anyone know if the 4.3 vpn client will work with fortiOS 5.x?

Yes, v4.3 VPN client works with v5.x FOS. @Computer Magic The following docs might be able to help: http://docs.fortinet.com/fclient/forticlient-admin-502.pdf (p32 - 33) http://docs.fortinet.com/fclient/forticlient-xml-ref-50.pdf LC

[Computer_Magic]

Thanks L. Clarke I found those documents the other day. What I was looking to do was disable the AV from even installing and it doesn' t look like that is possible still. I misread rsmayer' s post and thought he was saying you can customize the client and take those pieces out that you don' t want installed. This was not the case unfortunately. This is really a sore spot with me with the Forticlient product and I think they are doing a disservice to their customers by not releasing a client with VPN only capabilities. Hopefully this can get done or at least give us the options to not install those parts again through the install. I don' t understand why these options were even taken out to begin with.

[Wayne11]

Same here, we started with the 5.0.5 client and only need the SSL VPN feature, but even if we disable the AV functionality, from time to time the FortiClient is downloading new AV definitions and updates. So a deactivated feature on the client is still generating traffic [:' (] Would be nice to have the ability to just install the client only with VPN functionality.