NP7 based 1800F 2600F 4200F reduced FortiOS releases

[comsec]

Hello all.

All these new NP7 based enterprise appliances (1800F 2600F 4200F) have and unprecedented very low FortiOS choice.

1800F luckily was introduced with a special branch 6.0.9 and has all following minors.

It also has a platform specific terrible bug on DOS policies that makes them unusable, fixed with a custom build.

Others were introduced only with a 6.2 special branch and all are behind current minors.

They all stopped to 6.2.5 till yesterday, and they now finally have a 6.2.6 with three months delay, and still no 6.2.7

6.4 series also seems completely forgotten, with not a single release.

Since 6.2 series is not exactly one of the luckiest series and still has some quite important issues, software quality is a real issue here.

What's your production experience with these firewalls?

[juanruiz]

Hi! we happened to buy two of these monster machines, both of them unusable right now because of old firmware release, SD-WAN behaves terribly shutting down all traffic at random times, only way to pass data again is to reboot the fortigate.

[paulxharry]

Thanks for the clarification.

[echo]

How do they behave now, a year later?

[Debbie_FTNT]

Hey echo,

I'm not sure if I'm qualified to respond, given where I'm employed, but I recently used an 1800F for lab work (explicit and transparent proxy, VPN, FSSO primarily) and didn't have any issues. I operated it in 6.4.6 and then upgraded to 6.4.8 without any issues.

- The are still limitations regarding available firmware; it usually takes some months for new models (especially new models with new NP7 architecture) to be merged into the general firmware release

- the NP7 models should be merged into mainstream firmware releases in the near future, from what I was able to see internally

[echo]

Good to know! We are about to buy a cluster of 1800F's this year and I'm not sure we're going to FortiOS 7 immediately. On the other hand, the WAD memory leak (Bug ID 712584) is still concerning in 6.4 later versions. I don't know though if it is already OK in ver 7.

[Debbie_FTNT]

Hey echo,

The bug you referenced is fixed in 7.0.4 and higher; the first build for 1800Fs in 7.0 is planned to be off 7.0.5, I believe, before 1800F gets merged into the mainstream release.

The bug should also be fixed in upcoming 6.4.9; from what I saw.

[echo]

Thank you very much for preliminary information about this. Eventually, these things/details affect how the new device will work and what are the options for remedy if any serious (known or not yet known) problem appears. Big and powerful devices tend to affect important services and the more information about the problem solving, the better.