Remotely turn on Fortigate after graceful shutdown

[reid88]

Hi,

I'm trying to find a solution to the problem of turning on a Fortigate after shutdown (for example triggered by an UPS event due to power outage).

In short, are Fortigates expected to "crash" on power outages so they reboot themselves (won't this affect the unit and file system?) or is graceful shutdown the way to go (triggered by an UPS or other system) and there's a way to start it again without manual intervention (yee ol' on/off switch for the units that have them or manually unpluggin and replugging the unit).

I can't find any relevant material on how I can start the Fortigate if it was gracefully shut down, something like wake on LAN or serial input or anything.

Any ideas? I'm completely stuck on this.

[Markus_M]

Hi reid,

as far as I'm aware, there is no Wake-On-LAN (WOL) feature with the FortiGates, but I stand happily corrected if that is wrong. There is no serial console connection either possible as the device is halted.

When the device is powered off, it "should" automatically start up and power on as it has no power-on button.

If the grid is a bit unstable, power supplies might not do well and get stuck. Powering off and on with some delay would close to certainly do the job. On later FortiOS's there is an automated file system check on boot. Ideally these can be avoided, but the FortiGate would normally recover from these outages without anyone noticing.

Best regards,

Markus

[gfleming]

You should invest in a Smart PDU. Something you can log in to and control the individual power outlets. Most network infrastructure does not have what you are looking for and many people rely on smart PDUs to accomplish what you want.