A look at the Fortinet beta program

Fortinet has been offering  a beta program for development of their FortiOS software. This beta program is suppose to help identify bugs and features improvements prior to introduction of new features and functions in a major code release.

To Participate you must have a fortinet firewall that's under contract as listed by their agreement cause;

Anybody can  submit  a request  and entrance into the beta program or forward arequest to another user. The beta team will review to see if they meet the criteria under their acceptance cause.

Once you have been accepted, you can now download code for  your registered devices.

It's advise able not to install beta-code on production critical devices.


Beta code is just that Beta. So expect mis-behavior and performance impacts. So YMMV and use at your risk surely applies here. If your network become unstable or breaks, don't blame fortinet.


Once you have download the code and upgraded a unit, your system will state the build as being beta.

NOTE: The code will not expire nor have any limitations

To be a good beta tester , you should develop a plan to record events and create  a diary  of events and issues that you find. By doing so and contacting the beta admins and forums, you can now gain information and provide your findings to the team & beta community.

It's crucial to complain to the team on both  positive or negative findings so they can be made aware of issues that you find.

http://support.fortinet.com/forum/

Without the feedback, they will not know of any issues that you may have found. I don't know of any other  security provider that offers a beta release and welcomes a selected group of testers invited to the general public.


Ken Felix
Freelance Network/Security Engineer
kfelix -<a-t>  socpuppets-<d-o-t>- com