I have a complaining customer who I’m becoming convinced is exceeding the
NAT connection table in their router. Can I trust the numbers here:
http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanwan/router-charts/bar/77-max-simul-conn
This would indicate a mid-range route like a typical N600 probably supports
around 4,000 connections. I'm not sure why this is, if you look at the RAM
specs for any of these routers, it doesn't seem like a technical limitation,
it's almost like they are artificially limiting the connections by price for
marketing reasons. But I think this customer has something like a Netgear
WNDR3400.
Anyway, am I barking up the wrong tree, or is this a possible or even fairly
common situation? I don't see any evidence this customer is doing Torrents,
but there seem to be a lot of TCP connections, and a lot of apps that seem
to have 4-10 or more connections open. Including Pandora, not sure why
Pandora would need so many connections.
Please note, the SM is bridged, I am not doing NAT in the SM.
Is there any way to prove this other than give them a Mikrotik?
And on a Mikrotik, can I tweak the UDP/TCP timeouts to flush out idle
connections faster? Seems like even with infinite memory, there are only
65K possible ports for NAT/PAT and you would run into port exhaustion.
