Thursday 10 October 2019

Installing the new Fortinet VPN client on MS-Windows

After the last round of MS-Windows updates, running Fortinet's VPN client on my work laptop (MS-Windows) resulted a BSOD. So I downloaded the new client from Fortinet - round about 1Mb and it didn't take too long. But then I discovered that the thing I had downloaded was not the client, but a downloader to download the client.

This took rather a long time to do its job (on a 200Mb internet link). Meanwhile I:

  • Found a spare Linux host,
  • ran an OS update/upgrade
  • installed openfortivpn
  • configured this for first time round
  • discovered the remote end does not use a trusted certificate
  • reconfigured vpn
  • discovered the remote end is publishing routes which trash the local routing configured
  • rebooted the server ( I was connecting over ssh)
  • made myself a coffee
  • RTFM
  • Went for lunch
  • Came back and discovered the download had finished
  • Installed the new version of the MS-Windows client
  • Discovered that 
  •   1) it had overwritten the old client
  •   2) that it would not connect - turns out to be a *different* VPN client from what I had before
  • Started downloading something else from Fortinet (as advised by colleague)
  • Worked out how to manually set up the routes on Linux and got a working connection
  • Finished the task for which I wanted a VPN connection
  • Startup the new client and found it was the same as the one I had installed earlier