NAT¶

General concept¶

NAT (Network Address Translation) is used to provide instances with internet access when located behind a router. By default, a router will have a source NAT setup when launching it. This means that the router will be assigned a floating ip on its external interface and when instances on the internal network wants to access the internet, the router will change the source IP of the request to its own floating IP.

The reason for this is that private subnets are normally assigned from the pool of IPs that are reserved for internal usage (as per RFC1918). These IPs are not globally routed on the internet, the reasoning behind this is to avoid IP collisions.

The router is able to mask requests as coming from itself and by doing so, all instances are able to share the routers single public IP. Incoming requests to an instance can’t use the routers IP address but rather a floating IP. If an instance has a floating IP configured, it will instead use its floating IP as source address when connecting to the internet. This works the same way but instead of sending inbound and outbound requests from different IPs, the floating IP takes precedence.

Verify NAT address of router¶

Below are some ways to verify which IP address your router will use for outbound internet connections (SNAT):

In the Cloud management portal, press “Network” and then “Routers”. Press the router you want to verify. under “External network” you will see the outbound SNAT ips.
In OpenStack Horizon portal under “project”, press “Network” and then “Routers”. Press the router you want to verify. under “External gateway” you will see “External fixed IPs”. These are the outbound SNAT IPs.
Using the OpenStack Terminal Client, run this command: openstack router list to get a list of your routers, followed by openstack router show [ROUTER NAME] -c external_gateway_info -f yaml which will give you a yaml formatted list of the outbound SNAT IPs.