We started rolling out CGNAT about 6 months ago. It was smooth sailing
for the first few months, but we eventually did run into a number of
issues.
Our customer base is primarily FTTH with "dynamic" IP assignment via DHCP.
Since connections are always-on, customer ONTs/routers get an IP assigned,
and then when the lease is renewed, they request a new lease for the
existing IP, and, in general, that request is granted. This gives
customers the mistaken impression they have a static IP. So, my
impression, from working with some customers who've needed to be moved
from CGNAT back to public IP is that customers who are doing
port-forwarding don't even bother with dynamic DNS. They just know they
can connect to their IP as they've never seen it change. We do offer/sell
static IP, but pre-CGNAT, it was strictly for business customers. i.e.
A residential customer could only get static IP service by converting
their account to a business account. That may change in the near future.
One issue we didn't foresee has been IP Geo issues. i.e. We all knew
that streaming services like Netflix use IP Geo to determine what content
should be made available, but that's, AFAIK, limited by country or region.
What we didn't anticipate is services like Hulu Live TV doing IP Geo down
to the city level to determine which local channels are a subscriber's
local channels. We're using Juniper MX gear and SPC3 cards for our CGNAT
routers, each one having a single large external pool. Since we serve
most of FL, one external pool can't IP Geo correctly for customers as far
apart as Miami and Jacksonville hitting the same CGNAT router. We don't
currently have an acceptable solution to this other than moving impacted
customers off CGNAT.
One of the great unknowns (at least for us) with CGNAT was what our PBA
settings should be. i.e. How large each port-block should be, and how
many port-blocks to allow per customer. We started with 256x4. It seemed
to work. We eventually noticed that we were logging port-block exceeded
errors. This is one aspect where Juniper's CGNAT support is lacking.
There's a counter for these errors, and it's available via SNMP, but
there's no way to attribute the errors to subscriber IPs. We're polling
the mib and graphing it, so we know it's a continuing issue and can see
when it's incrementing faster/slower, but Junos provides no means for
determining if "PBEs" are all being caused by a single customer, a handful
of customers, etc. We have a JTAC case open on this. As a quick &
hopeful fix, we both increased the port-block size and block limit. That
helped, but didn't stop the errors. It also cut our CGNAT ratio by more
than half (64:1 -> 28:1), if we stay at this ratio, we'll need much larger
external pools than originally anticipated. Tuning these settings is kind
of painful as JTAC strongly recommends bouncing the CGNAT service anytime
CGNAT related config changes are made. This means briefly breaking
Internet access for all CGNAT'd customers. For the PBEs, JTAC's
suggestions so far have been to shorten some of the timeouts in the config
and to keep doing what we're doing, which is a cron job that essentially
does a "show services nat source port-block", parses the output looking
for subscriber IPs that have used up the ports in several of their
port-blocks, then does a "show services sessions source-prefix ..." and
logs all of this. This at least gives us snapshots of "who's a heavy user
right now" and lets us look at how they were using all their ports. i.e.
was it bittorent, are they compromised and scanning the internet for more
systems to compromise, is it legit looking traffic - just lots of it,
etc.?
The latest CGNAT issue is a customer with a Palo Alto Networks firewall
connected to our network and several of their employees are our FTTH
customers. On their PANW firewall, they're doing IP Geo based filtering,
limiting access to internal servers to "US IPs". Since we only CGNAT
traffic to the external Internet, their on-net employees hit the firewall
from their 100.64/10 IPs and get blocked. I suggested they whitelist
100.64/10, saying we block traffic from 100.64/10 from entering our
network via peering and transit, so they can be assured anything from
100.64/10 came from inside our network / our customers. They say the
firewall won't let them whitelist 100.64.0.0/10, giving an error that it's
invalid IP space.
I know we're not the first to implement CGNAT, so I'm curious if others
have run into these sorts of issues, or others we haven't run into yet,
and if so, how you solved them.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Jon Lewis, MCP :) | I route
Blue Stream Fiber, Sr. Neteng | therefore you are
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