Monthly Archives: September 2016

Fortigate 5.4 – Named policies

Fortigate has done a great job with the 5.4 firmware. Its a big change from 5.2 but once you get going with it, you will find things are structured very well. For example the “Monitor” category is a great way to get everything you need, instead of going through each individual category.

One feature of 5.4 that really “Grinds my gears” is the named policy feature. The feature itself is awesome, great way to put in a name on a policy such as “Students to internet”.. etc.  But, they make it mandatory to put in a name by default. What’s so aggregating about this is that if you upgrade to 5.4 from 5.2 all of your policies are unnamed, so when you modify one of those existing policies you HAVE to put in a name. The following will show how to turn that feature off, so it is not mandatory you put in a name. You still can, just don’t have to.

Below you will see what happens when you try to create that policy , and the the feature has not been disabled. You get the “This field is required.” error. It will not let you create or modify the policy until that is filled in.

rule-creation-error

To disable this feature, go to system-Feature select- then check “Allow unnamed policies”. Once you press Apply this will let you bypass the mandatory name feature.

services