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Category: Practical – Fortinet

Running Fortigate FW VM inside of GNS3

In this post we describe how to run Fortigate FW VM appliance inside of the GNS3 (local or remote).

Prerequisities and environment

  • GNS3
    • In my case of version 2.1.1 running on a remote linux server (physical HW, not GSN3 VM).
    Fortigate VM Image for KVM
    • In my case FortiGate for KVM platform Version 6.2.
    • Download from HERE using Fortigate.ONE account (may create for free).
    GNS3 Fortigate Appliance

    Note: FortiGate VM evaluation license

    FortiGate VM includes a limited embedded 15-day trial license that supports:

Problem with a VoIP phone behind NAT – disabling FortiGate SIP ALG

Initial state and observed problems

Observed problems

We had observed a problem, where a SIP phone is registering, but the AOR record indicates, that as a Contact IP address the incorrect and strange private IP address is used. As is shown on following listing:

voip*CLI> pjsip show aor 1765
   Aor:  <Aor..............................................>  <MaxContact>
     Contact:     
   Aor:  1765                                                 1 Contact:  1765/sip:1765@10.16.42.46:65476              f123d14d1c NonQual         nan
 ParameterName        : ParameterValue
  =================================================
  authenticate_qualify : false
  contact              : sip:1765@10.16.42.46:65476
  default_expiration   : 7200
  mailboxes            :
  max_contacts         : 1
  maximum_expiration   : 7200
  minimum_expiration   : 60
  outbound_proxy       :
  qualify_frequency    : 0
  qualify_timeout      : 3.000000
  remove_existing      : true
  support_path         : false
  voicemail_extension  :

This cause a problem, where incoming phone calls (call on 1765 number) are not reaching the SIP phone. We had tried to solve the situations on the phone only modifying its NAT configuration and using STUN, but with no success. Then we setup the lab with two Cisco NAT to simulate the topo. It works perfectly. This indicate on a problem with the Fortigate firewall. Several posts indicates that it could be the SIP ALG problem, which is on Fortigate devices turned on by default and it modifies SIP messages.