How to Manage the Fortigate Secondary/Passive Firewall and Shutdown the HA Pair

This post is to document the process to manage the secondary Fortigate firewall in a HA firewall cluster, as well as the process to shut down the Fortigate firewall using CLI.

This process comes in handy if you are using the same interface for both data and management traffic for the HA pair.

Manage the passive/secondary firewall from the primary member

Use the “tab” key to list the possible options

execute ha manage 1 admin

Shutdown Fortigate Firewall Cluster

To shut down the passive/secondary firewall member first, use the command below, after the connection to the secondary firewall is closed, you are back on the primary/1st firewall.

execute shutdown

Repeat the command for the Primary/First Firewall

Useful links

https://community.fortinet.com/t5/FortiGate/Technical-Tip-How-to-access-secondary-unit-of-HA-cluster-via-CLI/ta-p/198142

2 thoughts on “How to Manage the Fortigate Secondary/Passive Firewall and Shutdown the HA Pair”

  1. We are running firmware 6.4. To list the subsidary unit I used the ?. Tab did not produce the list. Thanks.

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