Fortinet FortiGate-50

Many SoHo firewall appliances specialise in specific areas, but Fortinet's NPG (network protection gateway) range wants to do it all. You get a standard stateful packet inspection firewall, support for IPSec VPN tunnels and web content filtering. Even the entry-level FortiGate-50 has anti-virus email attachment scanning and network intrusion detection.

Setup only takes a few minutes. Just point a web browser at the default IP address and a Wizard guides you through the basics and points you to one of two firewall modes. A NAT/route mode is used when the appliance is placed directly between your ISP and private network, while a transparent mode allows it to be inserted into any point in a network.

The browser interface is well designed, with functions tidily arranged in a menu down one side. The defaults allow the internal LAN access to the Internet but block all other connections. For more control over traffic between the internal and external interfaces, you'll need to implement extra firewall policies. There's a lot to play with here. You can schedule policies to be active at specific times and even assign traffic priorities to each one.

IPSec VPN tunnels can be set up with other firewalls, including SonicWALL Pro, Cisco and CheckPoint, but you'll need the optional client software to create secure connections to a remote PC. Web content filtering options are extensive. You can block sites by URL, word or phrase, create custom lists of banned sites and, while they'll incur extensive editing, download and apply lists from squidGuard. Fortinet provides anti-virus signature files for automatic download, and the same applies to attack signatures for the intrusion-detection database. Event logging is particularly good - warnings can be sent to three email accounts.

As a network protection gateway, the FortiGate-50 delivers well. It offers a wealth of security measures in a compact, easily configured and managed appliance.

Author: Dave Mitchell