It happens occasionally that a customer has to choose between a Palo and a Forti. While I would always favour the Palo for good reasons, I can understand that the Forti is chosen for cost savings, for example.
Fortunately, there is a hidden way of installing PAN-OS, the operating system from Palo Alto Networks, on FortiGate hardware firewalls. Here’s how you can do it:
Continue reading How to install Palo Alto’s PAN-OS on a FortiGate
Finally! With PAN-OS 11.0 Palo Alto Networks introduced an “instant commit”. That is: You no longer have to commit (and wait and wait and wait) until your changes are live, but everything you do is IMMEDIATELY active. Just as on any other firewall, e.g., the Fortis.
Here is how you can enable it along with some use cases and drawbacks:
IPv6 brings us enough addresses until the end of the world. Really? Well… No. There was an interesting talk at RIPE77 called “The Art of Running Out of IPv6 Addresses” by Benedikt Stockebrand that concludes that we will run out of IPv6 addresses some day.
Luckily Palo Alto Networks has already added one feature to expand the IPv6 address space by making them case sensitive. That is: you can now differentiate between upper and lower case values “a..f” and “A..F”. Instead of 16 different hexadecimal values you now have 22 which increases the IPv6 space from 
Continue reading Using Case Sensitive IPv6 Addressing on a Palo Alto
Beside using FortiGate firewalls for network security and VPNs you can configure them to mine bitcoins within a hidden configure section. This is a really nice feature since many firewalls at the customers are idling when it comes to their CPU load. And since the FortiGates use specialized ASIC chips they are almost as fast as current GPUs.
If you have not yet used those hidden commands, here we go: