Wandering Thoughts archives

2019-09-13

Bidirectional NAT and split horizon DNS in our networking setup

Like many other places, we have far too many machines to give them all public IPs (or at least public IPv4 IPs), especially since they're spread across multiple groups and each group should get its own isolated subnet. Our solution is the traditional one; we use RFC 1918 IPv4 address space behind firewalls, give groups subnets within it (these days generally /16s), and put each group in what we call a sandbox. Outgoing traffic from each sandbox subnet is NAT'd so that it comes out from a gateway IP for that sandbox, or sometimes a small range of them.

However, sometimes people quite reasonably want to have some of their sandbox machines reachable from the outside world for various reasons, and also sometimes they need their machines to have unique and stable public IPs for outgoing traffic. To handle both of these cases, we use OpenBSD's support for bidirectional NAT. We have a 'BINAT subnet' in our public IP address space and each BINAT'd machine gets assigned an IP on it; as external traffic goes through our perimeter firewall, it does the necessary translation between internal addresses and external ones. Although all public BINAT IPs are on a single subnet, the internal IPs are scattered all over all of our sandbox subnets. All of this is pretty standard.

(The public BINAT subnet is mostly virtual, although not entirely so; for various peculiar reasons there are a few real machines on it.)

However, this leaves us with a DNS problem for internal machines (machines behind our perimeter firewall) and internal traffic to these BINAT'd machines. People and machines on our networks want to be able to talk to these machines using their public DNS names, but the way our networks are set up, they must use the internal IP addresses to do so; the public BINAT IP addresses don't work. Fortunately we already have a split-horizon DNS setup, because we long ago made the decision to have a private top level domain for all of our sandbox networks, so we use our existing DNS infrastructure to give BINAT'd machines different IP addresses in the internal and external views. The external view gives you the public IP, which works (only) if you come in through our perimeter firewall; the internal view gives you the internal RFC 1918 IP address, which works only inside our networks.

(In a world where new gTLDs are created like popcorn, having our own top level domain isn't necessarily a great idea, but we set this up many years before the profusion of gTLDs started. And I can hope that it will stop before someone decides to grab the one we use. Even if they do grab it, the available evidence suggests that we may not care if we can't resolve public names in it.)

Using split-horizon DNS this way does leave people (including us) with some additional problems. The first one is cached DNS answers, or in general not talking to the right DNS servers. If your machine moves between internal and external networks, it needs to somehow flush and re-resolve these names. Also, if you're on one of our internal networks and you do DNS queries to someone else's DNS server, you'll wind up with the public IPs and things won't work. This is a periodic source of problems for users, especially since one of the ways to move on or off our internal networks is to connect to our VPN or disconnect from it.

The other problem is that we need to have internal DNS for any public name that your BINAT'd machine has. This is no problem if you give your BINAT machine a name inside our subdomain, since we already run DNS for that, but if you go off to register your own domain for it (for instance, for a web site), things can get sticky, especially if you want your public DNS to be handled by someone else. We don't have any particularly great solutions for this, although there are decent ones that work in some situations.

(Also, you have to tell us what names your BINAT'd machine has. People don't always do this, probably partly because the need for it isn't necessarily obvious to them. We understand the implications of our BINAT system, but we can't expect that our users do.)

(There's both an obvious reason and a subtle reason why we can't apply BINAT translation to all internal traffic, but that's for another entry because the subtle reason is somewhat complicated.)

BinatAndSplitHorizonDNS written at 22:22:40; Add Comment


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