Ascend Archive
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Re: (ASCEND) NAT: Yadda yadda yadda



On Fri, 23 Jan 1998, Jeff Culverhouse wrote:

> I have been dealing with a troublesome P130 for several weeks now, and
> Ascend tech support has narrowed it down to the fact that I have 50-75
> hosts on my internal network and the NAT table on my P130 is getting too
> full!  It looks like I will be moving to some form of outside proxy server,

This disheartens me.  I know that the Pipeline 25 is not useful for large
installations for such reasons, but I can understand that as the 25 is
intended only for very small installations.  However, does anyone know
what the NAT table limits on other Pipelines are?  I have a network of 28
hosts who don't need any services other than websurfing and email coming
up and I hate to have to assign them a whole /27 subnet, especially since
they might increase the size of this network and require a /26, I would
really be disheartened by such a thing.  I was going to use a Pipeline 50
for this, tell me it will not fail :)

> hosts blowing the table, but tech support told me they expected only 10-15
> hosts (a *small* office) to use NAT - wow! 10-15 hosts on a T1 - wouldn't

Ascend probably never expected anyone to use NAT over a T1 link, most
people that pay for a T1 can get their ISP to assign them whatever they
ask.  NAT was probably expected only over ISDN.  And I wouldn't expect
50-75 hosts on an ISDN link either.  :)  (Although as I said, I'm going to
put about 30 on one :) )

> Anyone else have comments about this?  We have a Win NT box that will be
> the mail server - I guess I could pull it out of the internal network and
> run proxy on it - anyone have suggestions?  MS Proxy 2.0??

Linux makes a very good proxy server using its built-in features called
IP-Masquerading.  It isn't as good as having NAT on your router, but it's
pretty close.  It runs on less system requirements than NT and is faster,
if you just want it for a firewall and address-translater you could
probably make do with a 486 or a cheap used Pentium, which you could get
for $500, and you would only need 8MB of RAM for it.  You could use it for
such features as a WWW proxy as well, and the whole software package costs
only $50 (or you could download it, with your T1 link :) )  And you save
your NT server for its intended purposes. 

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