/forticlient_vpn

forticlient_vpn

Debian packages of FortiClient 7.x.x for Ubuntu. forticlient_vpn_*.deb packages are the free, non-EMS, VPN-only VPN client used for connecting to Fortinet SSL-VPN services. See the different distribution kinds on Fortinet's Administration Guide.

Install the .deb package with apt.

sudo apt install ./forticlient_vpn_7.2.1.0700_amd64.deb

Unlike the official EMS client, there's no forticlient binary available on PATH to run. To connect to the VPN, directly use the binary installed in /opt/forticlient.

sudo /opt/forticlient/vpn -s <your_vpn_server> -u <your_username> -p

It will ask for password: via standard input. If you're using a GUI, there should be some GUI binaries in /opt/forticlient too.

For use in CircleCI

I originally researched this to configure a CircleCI job to deploy on a server behind a Fortinet SSL-VPN. You can find the very hard to find Debian packages in the releases. Thanks to GitHub, these are all permalinks.

Official EMS clients

The regular, EMS clients are available officially on Fortinet's APT repository. To install officially from this repository, add the GPG keys and install with apt.

curl -sS https://repo.fortinet.com/repo/forticlient/7.2/ubuntu/DEB-GPG-KEY | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/repo.fortinet.com.gpg
echo "deb [arch=amd64 signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/repo.fortinet.com.gpg] https://repo.fortinet.com/repo/forticlient/7.2/ubuntu/ /stable multiverse" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/repo.fortinet.com.list
sudo apt update
sudo apt install forticlient

Note

Fortinet's official guides to install FortiClient on Linux here, here, and here are all bogus and will fail at sudo apt update because they are not in sync with the actual APT repository. There is no non-free distribution in the repository. There's /stable/multiverse. Also, apt-key is deprecated in later versions of Ubuntu.

Run forticlient to connect to the VPN.

Important

This this client will give you this error on incompatible SSL-VPN services.

FortiClient VPN Trial has expired. Please contact your administrator or connect to EMS for license activation.

Starting and stopping the service

Use systemctl to start or stop the VPN (in both EMS and non-EMS clients).

systemctl start forticlient.service
systemctl stop forticlient.service