Internet to Shared Gateway

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Internet to Shared Gateway

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Has anyone used a Shared Gateway for inbound connectivity? For example, if one wanted to host both an "Internet Surfing" Vsys for people to use for outbound Internet traffic and a separate vsys for a DMZ style setup, where users from the Internet would initiate connections into an environment.

My real question lies in a scenario where you would have a proxy-arp for inbound from the Internet connectivity. If your shared gateway hosted an IP address of 172.16.0.1 and  was on a 172.16.0.0/24 network, and you had additional hosts that would receive connections using public IPs from this range (let's say 172.16.0.2 represents an internal 192.168.0.2 server), would the NAT setup take place on the external gateway? I believe it would.

More importantly, if the NAT rule is applied on the external gateway to allow this, would the corresponding security rule use the orignal IP address as a destination (172.16.0.2) or the NAT'd address (192.168.0.2).

I know without shared gateways being involved, you'd use the original IP in both the security and NAT rule. In this case though, does the NAT occur BEFORE it's handed off to the proper vsys for security evaluation?

I appreciate you all taking the time to look this one over.

3 REPLIES 3

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I might have stumbled across my own answer. In standard NAT setups the NAT isn't applied until the traffic egresses the firewall interface (according to documentation). If that's the case here, I'm assuming the NAT rule would have to be configured on the Shared Gateway (so it would proxy arp for the incoming session), but the Security policy would still use the original (un-NAT'd) address as the traffic still has not physicaly left the unit.

Is that correct?

Or arguably perhaps the Shared Gateway follows the same rules as a vsys for NAT, except it has no Security policy, so it simply performs the NAT based on the NAT rule and then routes it on to the vsys.

(I'm starting to talk myself in circles now). Smiley Happy

Well, further testing has shown that, in the case of shared gateways, the NAT rules applied to that gateway are applied before the traffic is forwarded inside to the vsys. I was able to successfully ping a test machine hosted off an internal interface on a vsys from the Internet using a destination NAT.

The way I did this was to enter the destination NAT in the NAT policy of the shared gateway. Then, a security rule on the vsys using the internal (post-NAT) IP address of the host in question.

I'm assuming at this point that having the traffic egress the shared gateway to the vsys is, in effect, like having traffic traverse an egress interface on the firewall. That is, NAT is applied as it egresses the shared gateway via the external zone I created between it and the vsys.

Does this match up with anyone else's testing? Does Palo Alto support have any documentation for this that I am missing?

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