NAT

Per NAT IP Pool

This approach adds on to the previous one by adding another variable. In this case that variable is the IP addresses on the public side of the FortiGate. By having a pool of IP addresses to assign as the source IP address when NATing, the same number that was potentially available for the Global per protocol method can be multiplied by the number of external IP addresses in the pool. If you can assign a second IP address to the pool, you can double the potential number of sessions.

 

Example:

In this example it will be assumed that the FortiGate has 2 IP addresses that it can use. This could happen either by using two ISPs, or by having a pool of IP addresses assigned to a single interface. For simplicity will will refer to these IP public IP addresses as u.u.u.1 and u.u.u.2.

Here are two possible packets that would be considered different by the FortiGate so that any responses from the web server would make it back to their correct original sender.

 

From Student A

 

Attribute Original Packet Packet after NATing
 

Source IP address or src-ip

 

10.1.1.56

 

u.u.u.1

 

Destination IP address or dst-ip:

 

w.w.w.1

 

w.w.w.1

 

Protocol

 

tcp

 

tcp

 

Source port or src-port:

 

10000

 

46372

 

Destination port or dst-port

 

80

 

80

 

From Student B

   
Attribute Original Packet Packet after NATing
 

Source IP address or src-ip

 

10.5.1.233

 

u.u.u.2

 

Destination IP address or dst-ip:

 

w.w.w.1

 

w.w.w.1

 

Protocol

 

tcp

 

tcp

 

Source port or src-port:

 

26785

 

46372

 

Destination port or dst-port

 

80

 

80

In this example we even made the protocl the same. After the NATing process all of the variables are the same except the sourse addresss. This is still going to make it bake to the original sender.

The drawback is that if you have only one IP address for the purposes of NATing this method does not gain you anything over the last method. Or if you do have multiple IP addresses to use it will still take quite a few to reach the 16 million possible that the subnet is capable of handling.

Fortinet does not use this method.

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