Fortinet Notes

I started using Fortinet in my data center at work over 15 years ago.  It was a Fortinet 800C firewall appliance.  In my home EE Lab, I started on a Fortinet 60E firewall appliance and FortiAP 221C.   In 2025, I upgraded to an Fortinet 61F firewall appliance and added a FortiAP 231G-A wireless access point.   I will be replacing the 221C with a 231K.

I use my firewall appliance to the limit.

  • IPv4 and IPv6:  Interfaces, SSIDs, etc.

  • SD-WAN

  • DNS Server using Cloudflare

  • IPSec VPN using FreeRadius

  • SSL VPN 

Web sites and FortiOS set to TLS v1.2 and v1.3

NTurbo

Fortinet NTurbo is a hardware acceleration feature used to offload and speed up flow-based security inspections on FortiGate firewalls. It directs traffic directly from ingress interfaces to the IPS (Intrusion Prevention System) engine and on to egress interfaces, reducing CPU overhead and drastically improving overall network throughput

config ips global
 set np-accel-mode basic
end

SPU

Fortinet’s Security Processing Unit (SPU), also known as a FortiASIC, is a custom-built processor designed to massively accelerate security and networking functions. By offloading resource-intensive tasks from the main CPU, it ensures ultra-low latency and higher overall system performance for enterprise networks

set auto-asic-offload enable
set np-acceleration enable

Before

After

SPU and nTurbo

SPU only

You can see fron the charts that the CPU usage is down, SPU and nTurbo are taking the load.