More Buying Network Hardware on Ebay

When we last left our hero, he had a real ebay-bargain on his hands, if he could only get it to work. For those who were wondering - a Fortigate FGT300 - MSRP somewhere around $7,000. The kindly, no-bs (and thus nameless) support guy at Fortinet allowed me to dl a copy of the OS that I could load onto the device over tftp. Load it up, fire it up - no go. Still the same old issues - no serial number, no access to the web admin page.

A couple of new issues flare up - namely bad blocks on 2 partitions of the hard drive. Do a little poking around and discover that FortiOS is a linux variant. How do I find that out? - by googling FortiOS which immediately points me to an article about how Fortinet are active violators of the GPL. Sigh.

In any case, FortiOS Linux-ness means that I should be able to plug the HD into a linux box, fsck the affected partitions and get it back to health. Also means that I might be able to poke around the filesystem and find the magic incantation needed to "turn this thing on". Or even plug a new HD in and rebake the cake from scratch.

Oh well, every minute I spend on this thing reduces its bargain factor, but what the hell. That's what the tech life is - one long learning experience.