Connect to the FortiGate

This recipe is part of the process of deploying FortiGate for GCP. See below for the rest of the recipes in this process:

1. Register and download your licenses
2. Connect to the FortiGate

To connect to the FortiGate VM, you need your login credentials and its public DNS address.

The default username is admin and the default password is the GCP instance ID, which is represented as a number.

1. Do one of the following to get the instance ID:
   1. Log into the FortiGate through the console on the VM Instance page on GCP. The first time you access the console, you can see the instance ID as seen below.
      
      
   2. Open the gcloud command line (Cloud Shell) on the VM instance details page or from a computer with Google Cloud SDK installed. Run the following command:

      $gcloud compute instances describe <instance_name> |grep id

      
      You will see a line starting with id: ‘<number>’. This is the FortiGate initial login password.

2. Open an HTTPS session using the public DNS address of the FortiGate VM in your browser (https://<public_DNS>). The public IP address is found on the same page.
   
3. Access the FortiGate in your browser.
   
4. You will see a certificate error message from the browser. This is expected since the default FortiGate certificate is self-signed and is not recognized by browsers. Proceed past the error message.
5. Log into the FortiGate VM with the username admin and the password.
6. Upload your license (.lic) file to activate the FortiGate VM. The FortiGate VM automatically restarts. After it restarts, wait about 30 minutes until the license is fully registered at Fortinet, and log in again.
   
   You now see the FortiGate dashboard. The information in the main dashboard varies depending on the instance type.
   

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