Yes, the subnet is delivered to the router over the WAN side. I'm not particularly worried if it's NAT (in the literal sense of NAT!) or externally routable addresses.

I get slightly frustrated that vendors continue to provide what they call "NAT", when they mean PAT. Then, when they do want to provide NAT, they then have to call it something else! So, for me, NAT = one to one relationship. PAT = many to one relationship. It has been a long time (>8 years) since I did much in the way of network design commercially, but I don't see that much has really changed.

So from my perspective, multiNAT just seems to be NAT.

It must be a term coined by marketing people, not techies who actually understand networking. It's not defined in any RFC.

I don't think the ability to run routed subnets and NAT simultaneously is a particularly difficult or unusual requirement.

Edited by caffn8me (Mon 02-Dec-13 13:56:32)

In reply to a post by GrahamM242:

So from my perspective, multiNAT just seems to be NAT.

Indeed. There's nothing 'multi' about it.

In reply to a post by GrahamM242:

So from my perspective, multiNAT just seems to be NAT.

In the vernacular NAT is "only" NAT whereas "Multi NAT" or the like is NAT with routed external IPs.

I mentioned it (probably regret it to be honest) to help locate kit with the appropriate features, rather than low end stuff that will only NAT from a group of private addresses via a single WAN.

It's helpful - don't get me wrong! Knowing the marketing terms for features is good, even if technicality they're the wrong terms - otherwise I'd have no clue what I was looking for. It's good to know what devices are capable of NAT and PAT at the same time.

In reply to a post by XRaySpeX:

Wouldn't this be the same situation as ADSL where the ISP supplies a block of IPs all coming to the single ADSL WAN port? Then using NAT Address Mapping to separate them?

Kinda but not quite right terminology. There's no NAT involved in this solution, the ISP sticks a single IP address on the WAN side and routes the subnet through it. The single IP is usually one of the range but doesn't have to be.

The point of having a subnet is that everything is routed, no NAT needed

In reply to a post by yarwell:

In the vernacular NAT is "only" NAT whereas "Multi NAT" or the like is NAT with routed external IPs.

I reckon that term goes back to the original 512k start of ADSL with BT openworld and their business products. BT always had a strange way of handling computer network stuff.

In reply to a post by yarwell:

we'll see who pops up with experience, I don't have FTTC.

I'm using pfSense 2.1 as a router with Zen FTTC and a /28 block. If you are interested in this approach, the choice of hardware depends on what you want to do - basic PPP/router/firewall functionality will run on much more modest hardware than if you use traffic shaping, IDS (i.e. Snort) and VPN endpoint functionality.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

In reply to a post by GrahamM242:

If so the traditional answer has been look at Draytek or Billion kit.

I found a manual for a BiPAC 7800VDP(O)X, which suggests it's more than capable of dealing with my requirements. It even looks like it might act as an endpoint for my IPv6 tunnel, which could be handy to have a single firewall dealing with v4 and v6.

In reply to a post by David_W:

In reply to a post by yarwell:

we'll see who pops up with experience, I don't have FTTC.

I'm using pfSense 2.1 as a router with Zen FTTC and a /28 block.

pfSense looks interesting, although hardware wise I'd prefer to go for low power consumption. I'm presuming that as it's FreeBSD, it's limited to x86 architecture? That said, I'm not sure I'd want to mess around trying to get it onto an ARM board or similar.