We deterministicly NAT up to four devices for an individual user to a
single public IP. As our typical user has less than four devices, it works
out that most students have a single public IP assigned to them. Should
they authenticate a fifth device, a second IP is assigned to cover devices
five, six, seven, and eight. The effect is that we've quadrupled our IP
utilization.

It's mostly a matter of handing out predetermined IP addresses which
include a series of bits used to identify which "group of four" it should
be NATed to. Our F5 box can examine the private IP, do a little bit
shuffling, and calculate the corresponding public IP. This calculation is
extremely light-weight, allowing the whole system to scale quite well. The
heavy lifting occurs when the device is on boarded the first time, at which
point a "group of four" is allocated for the user.

Norman Elton
College of William & Mary


On Monday, February 23, 2015, Chuck Anderson <[email protected]> wrote:

> If you have 1 public IP address reserved for each individual user, why
> do you need to do NAT at all?  This is a serious question--if you
> aren't saving public IPs by doing 1:many NAT, why do NAT at all?
>
> Thanks.
>
> On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 11:33:45AM -0500, Norman Elton wrote:
> > We play tricks with our ISC DHCP server and a pair of F5 LTMs (similar
> > to the A10 gear). The DHCP server hands out predetermined private IP
> > addresses to devices as soon as we determine ownership (through our
> > NAC). For outbound traffic, the F5 uses this private IP address to NAT
> > to a public IP address that is reserved for the individual user. The
> > end result is that no matter where the device is on campus, we know
> > that 128.239.x.y is something owned by Joe Smith. If we need to know
> > exactly which device, we consult our flow logs. But at least we're 99%
> > confident we're dealing with the right student.
> >
> > I'm happy to share the gory details if someone wants to wrap their
> > head around it.
> >
> > Norman Elton
> > College of William & Mary
> >
> >
> >
> > On Mon, Feb 23, 2015 at 10:30 AM, Danny Eaton <[email protected]
> <javascript:;>> wrote:
> > > We've got our Juniper SRX 5800 doing our NAT for all wireless, plus
> all students and visitors (wired or wireless).
> > >
> > > We send those logs (and the SRX is VERY CHATTY about NAT) to our
> Splunk server for the tying together of date/time, public IP and private IP
> - in the event we get a notice from some TLA.
> > >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: The EDUCAUSE Wireless Issues Constituent Group Listserv [mailto:
> [email protected] <javascript:;>] On Behalf Of Heath
> Barnhart
> > > Sent: Monday, February 23, 2015 9:12 AM
> > > To: [email protected] <javascript:;>
> > > Subject: Re: [WIRELESS-LAN] NAT tracking question
> > >
> > > We use a Sonicwall E8500 for NAT, it will log all NAT translations and
> send them as syslog to a server for storage. I have logrotate changing
> files every hour to make it easier to search on.
> > > --
> > > Heath Barnhart
> > > ITS Network Administrator
> > > Washburn University
> > > Topeka, KS
> > >
> > >
> > > On Wed, 2015-01-14 at 14:49 -0500, Jerry Bucklaew wrote:
> > >> To ALL:
> > >>
> > >>     We have a large Cisco wireless deployment with public ip address
> > >> space.  Getting more public IP's is getting difficult so we are
> > >> considering going to NAT.  The issue we have with NAT is that we still
> > >> want to be able to map an outside IP back to a individual user.  Once
> > >> you go to NAT that of course becomes more difficult to do.   I know a
> > >> lot of you are probably already doing this and I was wondering how and
> > >> what products do you use?  I assume most have a one to many NAT and
> then
> > >> use something like a netflow collector to to track the inside NAT IP
> to
> > >> the outside Src-IP/DST-IP/Port/Time. Any good working solutions or
> > >> products would be helpful.
>
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