When setting up High Availability on FortiGate, one thing struck me as a bit unusual. Differently from other firewall clustering solutions (correct me if I’m wrong), FortiGate devices don’t force you to assign both physical and logical IP addresses on interfaces. You are supposed to configure logical IP addresses only. This implies that you can’t directly access a specific node/firewall in your cluster. You have to SSH into the Master unit and, from there, log into the Subordinate one(s). Here are the relevant CLI commans:

I wonder what would happen if the Master unit were to hang. I mean: stuck itself in a state where the failover mechanism doesn’t work and neither does SSH/HTTPS access. How could you remotely force a failover to another node? In such a scenario, is a physical power cycle of the master unit the only option?