Currently I have our office connected to 3 other towers over 5Ghz 192.168.254.x
then the towers were numbered:
tower1 DHCP: 192.168.0.x
tower2 DHCP: 192.168.1.x
tower3 DHCP: 192.168.2.x
(each towers routerboard had 192.168.254.x back to office.)
Problem I have we are running out of numbers and we are also double NAT’d and Id like to fix that..
at the office we have load balancer 192.168.254.1 NATing DSL lines. then once it hits the towers Routerboards HOTSPOT is NATing again.
Whats the best way to fix this? NAT only at office and yet keep network chatter down.
To get around double NAT just don’t NAT on the Hotspot routers. You do not need to. Of course you will then need routes to the networks at the towers, either static or via a routing protocol - look into OSPF for that. If you’re out of IPs you’ll need to add additional networks, or renumbered your networks. Since your current scheme doesn’t allow you to grow networks because you simply used consecutive /24s already that means some network downtime.
would it be easier to just renumber everyone with somthing bigger then /24 (that will encompass all users on all towers) . would this have a network chatter issue ?
No, definitely have distinct networks on each tower. That is a good thing. But rather than assigning 192.168.0.0/24, .1.0/24, and .2.0/24 renumber things so you use 192.168.0.0/24, 192.168.16.0/24, and 192.168.32.0/24. Then when you need more IPs on a tower you can assign 192.168.1.0/24 (or grow to 192.168.0.0/23) without affecting other towers. Since you are probably using multiple radios on towers to connect that many clients I think it would be good to use distinct networks per radio. That minimizes the broadcast domain (and thus reduces “network chatter”). When you use a dynamic routing protocol this doesn’t occur a lot of overhead, either - add the new card, add the network to it, include it in OSPF, and all other routers learn about it automatically.
Using a bridged network everywhere may seem easier, but has a lot of disadvantages.