Packet drop due to source NAT IP/port allocation failed

Packet drop due to source NAT IP/port allocation failed

46230
Created On 09/25/18 20:40 PM - Last Modified 06/13/23 02:48 AM


Symptom


Symptoms

Firewall is dropping initial SYN packet. 

 

 

Diagnosis

Running show counter global shows the following counter increasing 

flow_policy_nat 284  1 drop flow  session Session setup: source NAT IP/port allocation error

 

Flow basic shows the following 

 

Allocated new session 5543.
Rule: index=4 name=Test, cfg_pool_idx=1 cfg_fallback_pool_idx=0
2018-06-20 22:38:30.473 -0700 debug: pan_flow_nat_setup_session(src/pan_flow_nat.c:2147): NAT Rule: name=Test_NAT, cfg_pool_idx=1; Session: index=5543, nat_pool_idx=1
2018-06-20 22:38:30.473 -0700 Error: pan_ippool_translate_dynamic(pan_ippool.c:2106): out of IP addresses and source ports
Packet dropped, source NAT IP/port allocation failed
Cannot setup session in egress vsys
Packet dropped, Session setup failed

 

ippool still shows free ports available.

 

>show running ippool

Rule                   Type               Used   Available  Mem Size  Ratio
---------------------- ---------------    ------ ---------  --------  ----- 
Test_NAT               Dynamic IP/Port    423126 92970      68720     8

 



Resolution


The main cause is the ippool is heavily used (more than 80%  with 8x over-subscription rate).

 

NAT pools work by hashing the destination address and trying specific buckets (depending on the hash value). If there are no free entries, we will attempt a simple version of brute force search.

If both fail, a failure will be returned.

This means that even though "show running ippool" may still show about 9k free entries, for some destination IPs (like google.com in web browsing) that a host already has many sessions to, we can't build a new session to this destination. However, it may be possible  to build a new session to a different destination.

 

 Additional external IP addresses are required to expand the available ippool for identical destinations.



Actions
  • Print
  • Copy Link

    https://knowledgebase.paloaltonetworks.com/KCSArticleDetail?id=kA10g000000ClkPCAS&refURL=http%3A%2F%2Fknowledgebase.paloaltonetworks.com%2FKCSArticleDetail

Choose Language