Fortinet has done a great job with their update, FortiOS 5.4. It’s a departure from 5.2, but once you get going with it, you will find things are structured very well. For example the “Monitor” category is a great way to get everything you need instead of having to go through each individual category.
However, one feature of 5.4 that really grinds my gears is the named policy feature. The feature itself is awesome — it’s a great way to put in a name on a policy, such as “Students to Internet,”etc. The problem is that they make it mandatory to put in a name by default. What’s so aggravating is that if you upgrade to 5.4 from 5.2, all of your policies are unnamed, so when you modify one of those existing policies it forces you to input a name.
The following will show how to turn that feature off, so it is not mandatory. You still can name your policies, but you won’t be required to.
Below you will see what happens when you try to create that policy if the feature has not been disabled. You get an error that says, “This field is required.” It will not let you create or modify the policy until that is filled in:
To disable this feature, go to system and then Feature Select. Check “Allow unnamed policies”. Once you click Apply you can bypass the mandatory name feature:
It’s a simple task but it really does remove a very annoying roadblock if you don’t want to name your policies.