Hi Jon, So is this easier than what the mobile carriers are doing -- 464xlat, isn't it? Probably a sizeable portion of the traffic would be running native v6, right? Obviously it wouldn't run into these sorts of problems. Mike On 10/8/24 12:19 PM, Jon Lewis wrote:

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 _________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________

We have ~60,000 subs on ftth, dsl and cable modem, behind several Juniper MX routers.... MX960's with MS-MPC-128G (ftth and cm) and MX104 with MS-MIC-16G (dsl) and doing well.  We a had some growing pains, issues, but were resolved with, app, eim, eif, and source ip load balancing on AMS interface.... also, since all my subs are in L3VPN's, I had to share inet.0 metric with inet.3 to get mp-ibgp to see other mx's as least cost route to accomplish nice load balancing.  we did about 3000 ports per sub, so like 100 port blocks at max of 30 (100*30=3000).  we usually do like a /24 or /23 at each MX960, and i recall /25 at the dsl MX104's.  I've senn actually high point max usage of a MS-MPC-128G flat line during peak time at approx 65gbps... and even more recently i recall seeing about 70gbs.  That's on a single MS-MPC-128G.  I hope I don't have to upgrade to SPC....(or dual ms-mps-128g)  I'd rather do dual stack ipv6 and bypass the cgnat boundary.  that's what my current focus is. -Aaron On 10/8/2024 2:19 PM, Jon Lewis wrote:

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 _________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________

-- -Aaron

Hi Jon, Are you dual stack? v6 would solve some of these issues? On Tue, Oct 8, 2024 at 12:20 PM Jon Lewis <jlewis@lewis.org> wrote:

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 _________ http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key_________