LAB INDEX / NOTES FROM THE LAB BENCH
TEST. BREAK. TRACE. Then write it down.
A network & security engineer's lab notebook — things built, broken, traced, and documented.
Catch a Silently Removed Security Profile — FortiManager + FortiAnalyzer
Someone edits a policy and drops the IPS profile. Traffic still flows, logs still look normal — inspection is just gone. Here's the FortiManager + FortiAnalyzer pattern that catches it in minutes, with a name attached.
ADVPN at Scale with FortiManager Templates
Hub-and-spoke IPsec hairpins every branch-to-branch flow through the datacentre. ADVPN fixes that with on-demand shortcuts — and FortiManager templates let you roll it out to fifty spokes without touching fifty CLIs.
Trace a Packet in 90 Seconds with debug flow
Why is this traffic being dropped?" On a FortiGate you don't guess — diagnose debug flow shows you exactly how the box handled the packet: policy match, NAT, route, allow or deny.
Alert the Instant Config Changes — Automation Stitches
A FortiGate automation stitch can ping your chat channel the moment anyone touches the config — no polling, no SIEM rule, just trigger → action wired straight into FortiOS.
One Template, Fifty Firewalls — FortiManager Metadata Variables
A CLI template is only reusable if the per-device bits are variables. Here's how metadata variables turn a single FortiManager template into a consistent rollout across an entire fleet.