Business Hub, Static IPs and Dedicated Firewalls

[bob_4563]

Hi,

Just a quick query to survey opinions on using the BT Hubs in front of dedicated firewalls with static IP addresses.

I always seem to run into endless fun and games with this style of setup, and was curious to see what other people's experiences were like?

For example, we might have this scenario:

Internal Network <-> Firewall <-> BT Hub <-> Phone socket/microfilter/etc

What we usually find is that due to the way the Hub identifies individual 'devices' on its internal interface, it doesn't play nicely with having a selection of static 1-to-1 NATs set up on the proper firewall, and only seems to play nicely with a single IP address tied to a single device/MAC address on its internal interface.

My gut instinct is generally to just throw the Hub out and use a proper ADSL router, but what experiences do other folk have in this situation? Has anyone made this kind of setup work correctly?

Thanks in advance!

Bob

[a-hill]

Hi bob, please forgive my ignorance here, but is there any reason that the WAN port of your firewall must have a local IP with a static mapped to it via 1-to-1 IP mapping and can't have the IP directly assigned? Generally I would've thought the a static directly on the WAN wouldn't really make much of a difference. Again please excuse my ignorance, obviously a network and it's needs are unique to the user.

The only real issues i've seen where the hub is totally unusable is when you want to map all 5/13 public IP's to the WAN port, where indeed the routers issue of only allowing 1 IP to 1 MAC makes it impossible.