Special Notices

This section highlights the special notices that should be taken into consideration before upgrading your platform.

Communication between HA secondary units

Due to the introduction of primary backup in active-active HA in FortiMail 7.4.0, communication between the secondary units is also required. In config-only HA before FortiMail 7.4.0, it was not required.

HA heartbeat and DHCP

If you upgrade from FortiMail 7.4.2 or earlier, and if the HA heartbeat's network interfaces have dynamic addresses such as DHCP, then you must either:

• before the upgrade, use static IP addresses instead

• after the upgrade:

  1. Immediately log in to all units in the cluster.

  2. Re-configure the heartbeat interfaces with their current IP addresses from the DHCP server.

  3. Reset the primary/secondary role if necessary, so that only one unit is the primary.

Cloud deployments (such as on Microsoft Azure) may commonly or by default use DHCP, requiring this setting change or procedure.

TFTP firmware install

Using TFTP via the serial console to install firmware during system boot time will erase all current FortiMail configurations and replace them with factory default settings.

Monitor settings for the GUI

To view all objects in the GUI properly, Fortinet recommends setting your monitor to a screen resolution of at least 1280 x 1024.

SSH connection

For security reasons, starting from FortiMail 5.4.2, FortiMail does not support SSH connections with plain-text password authentication. Instead, a challenge/response should be used.

FortiGuard web filtering category v10 update

Fortinet has updated its web filtering categories to v10, which includes two new URL categories for AI chat and cryptocurrency web sites. In order to use the new categories, customers must upgrade their Fortinet products to one of the versions below.

• FortiMail 7.0.7, 7.2.5, 7.4.1 or later