About ASU-NetworkTeam

I was at cisco Live as well. we might have been in the same room.    Those solutions are NOT cheap we got them quoted and was like WOW! ... View more

I updated our cisco 4500X to the latest gold star and gained route map ability and started using that. In the latest gold star release you do not need a enterprise license to do a lot of things.   Our setup used to look like yours but I got sick of it and change lots of it to route maps and ACL because troubleshooting turned into a pain in the rear and also TAC kept saying the same thing to us. SIMPLE is better. You should really look at Nessus and do netflows etc to it for security and scans. Take some of the load off that FW and save $$$. Also we use packetfence for 802.1X with a Suricata box we mirror all traffic to. They work together and trigger violations to keep problem users off the network. also it is free.... we are also going to intergrate nessus into our packetfence security once we get the licenses for nesses to do end user devices.   We are looking to change from 5020 to 3260 for budget reasons. the renewal is 60% less a year ... View more

Yes we stop doing the active / active due to budget. PA has some really outrageous pricing for active / active. It basically doubles the bill and not worth it in my opinion. You would be better off upgrading to a more powerful unit and doing active standby for budget reasons from what I have seen.   We have Active Standby and use LACP to a cisco 4500X routers. It works great and you also have the option to have the standby unit in no shut to keep routing protocol active if needed for faster fail over. Unless you have a need for the active / active because of usage, you are fine changing to active / passive. You know your network better than anyone so don’t just take my word, but it is worth researching it.   We have also found that the newer units are much more powerful than our older 5020 and the renewals are much LESS but the upfront purchase cost is ridiculous. I guess PA going to make $$$ somehow. You would think for the amount of money we pay we could at least get USA support 100%. I get so sick of calling and spending an hour or more getting passed the language barrier and then the technical explanation, or someone in India who really does not care and trying to just get the ticket closed.   So I test everything this morning XBOX and ps4. Xbox reports OPEN and ps4 is type 2 and working. The students are happy so far. Also issues with facetime quality and other things are gone. Using NAT pool apparently is a bad idea in palo alto world.   So yes down to two options. Route public WAN addresses to the clients or NAT each subnet to a different WAN address to avoid oversubscription.   I will post screenshots here in a few of what we did     ... View more

Working with PA support on NAT DIPP oversubscription , We might have stumbled across a solution. I come from a cisco ASA background and always have used nat pool or many to many NAT. Recently we hit a NAT DIPP problem and as a result I personally had to get PA support to explain to me what was going on. After a detailed explanation and each model has a hardware limitation. PA support advised I shrink (use a /25 or smaller ) or stop using NAT pool and just NAT our customer behind a single IP. At first I was very against this idea but after PA support explained for them this is a best practice and because they are confident in how they block botnet and other malware, I broke down and did it. After a hour I notice a HUGE increase in traffic and as a result we went out and started testing our self. We found that things improved overall Latency / packet loss / etc. Also the warnings about NAT on commit went away about downgrading to 1x oversubscription. I then had several XBOX and PS4 users redo network test and this resulted in OPEN or TYPE 2 NAT depending on the console. I will confirm on Monday when I take my own PS4 and XBOX to work to test in the office, but I think avoiding NAT pool oversubscription might have fixed this issue. along with the firewall rules I posted early on to open the traffic to XBOX LIVE and Playstation Network. Also we use secure works to watch our outgoing traffic and after 48hours and no notifications of botnet / malware from our RESNET. I was really worried going down to smaller subnet or single IP would have made us more vulnerable. I am guessing with us blocking incoming and the PA security features / protections this might be fine, but I am going to wait a full week before I make a final decision. End result for the NAT was I mapped /22 to /21 for each building WiFi to a single ip. We have a large subnet to use thanks to our ISP. As a result I used a different IP for each building to avoid major oversubscription. for LAN users I am still using 1 to 1 NAT /24 to /24 I will report more as we move along but I think this might be a solution. Welcome to feedback sense this has been a very deep discussions with PA support.   ... View more

I have put in more feature requests via our old rep and they are ignored. I will go look them up and post them later. We now have a new sales rep and sales SE as of last month. Slowly restoring my faith in PA customer support. I have also opened another ticket with PA support and asking them to solve this or provide a solution... we will see what happens. We have the same situation you are in. I ended up using our packetfence 802.1X to solve the issue for now. We have 2 wireless SSID. One for SECURE 802.1X access to the network and the other is unencrypted using MAC auth via a user device registration portal. If they register a gaming console, it puts them in a special Gaming VLAN in each dorm that gets a public ip with all INBOUND blocked. Works like a charm but teaching students how to use the thing is a problem every semester. We provide instructions but nobody reads now days...... I requests a new /20 from our ISP and waiting on a response. If they approve it I am going to just route WAN ip directly to the users and do away with NAT all together. Like you said all inbound will be blocked and if we set the lease time to 4hours for example it will keep rotating IPs because we have our DHCP set to never hand the device the same IP on renewal to avoid botnets or servers etc.   ... View more

Has anyone found any solution to this? Several years later and PA still refuses to acknowedge this problem. The solution I posted still works but I still belive we should not have go through with all this considering Cisco Firewalls do not have this issue with dynamic ip and port NAT. I understand PA is a security company but I still have to answer to 4k Univeristy Students. I had to request more IPs and do this for our wireless and wired in the dorms.    I think the root of the problem is PA is trying to do this as a NAT type 1 and we are not asking for that. We are in need of NAT type 2 to work and that does not require open inbound ports.   I saw where someone recommend increasing UDP time out I am going to try that soon. I have to bring a PS4 to work to test this stuff.... ... View more

After doing research on how the game systems work and what the consoles are looking for I was able to find a fix. I would like to thank all of you for your responses and being so helpful. dynamic-ip-and-port NAT was the problem. when this type of NAT is used every connection the game console sends out gets a different ip and port. This will not work because the way the consoles communicate is via UDP and they expect to use the same ip and udp port for 2 way communication. dynamic ip and port on PA seems to rotate the ports and ip aggressively. But on a cisco ASA it seems to use the same ip and ports per source ip as long as the connections stay active. Basically cisco ASA does not rotate the ports and ips as aggressively and attempts to maintain the same ports the client used to for udp communication. Keep in mind I am using dynamic NAT on the cisco ASA meaning I am using a pool of ip addresses. I am a heavy user of BSD and linux so after reading that on bsd and linux firewalls you must have the static-port option enabled. I did some thinking and changed the NAT rule to STATIC. I was able to get away with this because our ISP allocates me a /20. I do not think having a /20 helped in any way because I have known of people who have had 10+ console on a single ip and it worked but I did it anyway because I had it available to me. I plan in the near future of just doing away with NAT and doing direct IP assignment. Here is the FIX that worked for me without special VLANS or opening ports manually or assigning IP addresses directly to clients. I put this into production 24 hours ago and students are reporting they are able to use playstation and xbox consoles now showing nat type 2 and moderate when running connection tests. They also have 2 way voice communication now when playing inside of the games. Changed NAT from dynamic to static. I assign internal /24 ranges to our LAN network in the buildings so I also assigned a /24 public ip address pool. I also made sure bi-directional was set to yes Step 2 created a application filter called Game Consoles - I know this was over kill but it included xbox-live and playstation-network. Step 3 - Create the security rule using the Application Filter and disabled server response inspection Step 4 - Cleared the NAT tables via SSH Made a few phone calls to the students and asked them to test the connections and I could tell by the OMG it says type 2 ( playstation users ) and for xbox users it says moderate now instead of strict. They logged into a few different games and all reports it was working without lag and they were able to communicate via the headsets. I hope this helps people in the future. ... View more