Been lurking for quite some time, but this is my first post… Basically, I have plenty of LAN experience, and quite a bit of WLAN experience. What I haven’t ever done is deal much with WAN and multiple public IP addresses.
Myself and one other person are looking to help a small community school, volunteer fire department, etc obtain broadband. We are going to form a non-profit/co-op and build a wireless network from Ubiquiti gear to get access to the locations we need it. I plan on using Mikrotik routers throughout the network. No issues there at all.
My issue is that I have limited WAN experience. If I get issued a block of IP’s from my service provider, how do I setup the Mikrotiks to pass those public IP’s out to each location just as a normal ISP would do? I plan on having one router at the edge of the network attached to the providers gear, then a couple towers each with a router. So, I am going to need to pass multiple public IP addresses through at least two routers to get it to the customer. Obviously this is done everyday by every ISP in the world. I need some instruction, or better yet, some links to places where I can educate myself about how to do this correctly.
No offense but when someone says they have ‘plenty of LAN experience’ I would assume this includes an understanding of subnets and routing. Private or public IPs, routing doesn’t change. You’re asking a pretty basic networking question for someone wanting to step into the role of a service provider. To answer your question though, you subnet your public IPs and route them like any other. What you do at the border to handle routing with your provider is up to them.
Again I don’t mean to offend, I’m just being honest and to the point about knowledge you need that will make your like a whole lot easier in the future. I’d advise you to grab Cisco’s ICND 1 & 2 books and study them then look at their network design books. Network Warrior by Gary A. Donahue is also an excellent book to read as it covers a lot of practical knowledge.
Good network design and planning in the beginning will save you a lot of headaches later if you decide to expand.
If not, hire a consultant. Poor design may slip by on a small network but when traffic and size increases so will problems.
I do have plenty of LAN experience, and I’m experienced with subnets and routing. As I stated, I don’t have experience routing multiple public IP’s, so I was merely asking if this is done differently than routing private IP’s. I’ve not been a service provider and was just wanting to make sure I wasn’t going to be missing something before embarking on this project.
Honestly, it will be good for me to go through those books anyways. I spend a lot of my time managing servers and workstations, changing routing schemes isn’t something that needs to happen at my current job on a regular basis. So I will take your advice and get those books just because it’s been years since I’ve done any serious routing or studied it in school.
I’ve worked in small businesses my entire life. A couple of LAN segments and a single Public IP is really simple, and in the long run isn’t challenging to the point where you have to think about routing many public IP’s to many different places, so I guess that’s why I asked my question. Also, just because something is done one particular way in LAN routing doesn’t necessarily mean it’s done that way in WAN routing and/or an ISP type of situation. Those were the main reasons for my question.
I do appreciate your honest answers. Perhaps since I haven’t had to do it all that often I just don’t have any confidence in my routing skills. Either way, I will pick up those books and go through them. It’s not a big deal, this project will take some time to get off the ground anyways, as anything always does when waiting for CITY/COUNTY governments to do something.
MCT is correct in that this is really no different than private IP management. Operationally the only difference I often see between the two is that there is often an over provisioning of private address space (/24 for 30 customers, or /20 for 500) compared to public address management.
To answer your question, first thing you need to do is ask for a routed subnet. Have your provide route you your public subnet over a /30 or /31 point-to-point. This will allow you to utilize those IPs behind your edge router.
Second, you need to decide how you want to hand off those IPs to your customers. If your upstream allocates you anywhere between a /29 or /26 then I would recommend you distribute public IPs to customers via PPPoE as it gives you more granular control of address distribution, and thus lets you utilize only what you need; no waste of address space. If they allocate you a /25 or greater then you could get away with routing each customer a /29 or so. That should probably be sufficient for most needs.
I plan on having one router at the edge of the network attached to the providers gear, then a couple towers each with a router. So, I am going to need to pass multiple public IP addresses through at least two routers to get it to the customer. Obviously this is done everyday by every ISP in the world. I need some instruction, or better yet, some links to places where I can educate myself about how to do this correctly.
This could be dealt with one of two ways IMO. If the routers are daisy chained together (ie.edge → router1 → router 2 → customer) then you could provision a /31 between each router, and hand off a /29 to the customer over a /30 or /31. This is a bit wasteful, so your other option is to use private IPs for your internal network and tunnel the public traffic to the edge via EoIP, GRE, or VPLS. You conserve address space while still providing public IPs to the customer.
In the end, either way gets the job done so the decision is up to you.