Spectrum gives you a router in bridge mode. That router has your static IP assigned in its routing table, but you’re able to also assign that static IP address to your firewall of choice. Spectrum limits your bandwidth through the router. So here’s what I’m asking
I have an ISP that has a 1GB connection hand off from our datacenter provider. I plan to have multiple firewalls connected downstream and I want to place a router at the top so I can see what combined throughput I’m using from all networks.
Does anyone know of what type of router I should be looking for? I need to assign real routable IP’s to my firewalls similar to the way spectrum works, but I can’t seem to get the right googling to find the correct router type.
You are looking for anything that has “1:1 NAT” aka “1-1 NAT” (read as one-to-one). Unifi would NOT offer this for you, but any other small business or enterprise router should. I would just search the internet for “(series or OS) 1:1 NAT”, e.g. “PFSense 1:1 NAT” or “Mikrotik 1:1 NAT”, just to make sure that you do find some documentation/guides, and the process doesn’t look too scary.
OK, by “assign” I thought you meant in the modem/routers interface, which would be 1:1 NAT (mapping the public IP to a certain private IP host)
So if you don’t want NAT, you just want a router… that lets you disable NAT. Again, anything that is “small business” or enterprise will be able to be set up this way, except for Unifi.
Actually, depending on how the subnet is being given to you, you might not want a router. For example, if you are being given a single /26 (or whatever) and the ISP’s equipment is going to be responding to an IP in that range as the default gateway, then a router would make things harder. In that case you just want a managed switch, so that you can watch the traffic levels on the interface. If you want more visibility than what switches provide, a router with the interfaces bridged together could work as well - for PFSense this is normally used for inline firewall, so you would look for guides on that, but then just step at the point you want.
