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Corey_Webb_9791's avatar
Corey_Webb_9791
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Apr 14, 2008

NAT working intermittently?

I have an application and the developer is trying to blame BIG IP for a connectivity issue. He claims that the problem started when I created the NAT for administrative access and so his application can talk to the SQL database. The thing is this NAT is working all the time for other applications on the same server and about 80% of the time for the application in question. Has anyone expireneced anything like this and any ideas on what to look at?

6 Replies

  • Do you have a NAT defined for a host that's also a member of a pool? If so, and the issue is indeed with the BIG-IP, I'd take a wild stab in the dark and say the issue might be a conflict between the NAT and load balancing.

     

     

    A simple way to test this would be to remove the NAT and replace it with a VIP. The VIP would be defined with your old NAT address and have a single member in the pool (the node you want to connect to). You could either create a single port or all port VIP depending on your requirements. For outbound access from the node(s) to the internet, you could create a default SNAT enabled on the VLAN(s) you want source translation performed for, or another wildcard VIP.

     

     

    You can check SOL2251 (Click here) for a few different options for gaining admin access to nodes.

     

     

    Aaron
  • Same host but different IP addresses on the host example

     

     

    10.10.10.1 NAT to 10.10.11.1

     

    10.10.11.2 on same host and in pool but the 10.10.11.1 address is not in a pool.

     

  • Hrmm... that was my best guess. Maybe someone else has ideas?

     

     

    Else, it might be worth trying to replace the NAT with a VIP.

     

     

    Aaron
  • Thanks for the reponse and I might have to go with the VIP replacement for NAT but for now I am just trying to make sure that there was not some known issue out there with NATs being set up correctly and behaving badly. But I do appreciate whenever anyone responds in these forums as it is always helpful.
  • Could be an idle timeout issue if his application is idle for a while and doesn't know how to reestablish the session if it's cut off. Default idle timeout on NAT's is probably 300 seconds (I'm not next to a box at the moment to check that).

     

     

    Denny