I've got a relatively unique network (for me) that I have to clean up. Made more complicated by two major hurricanes devastating the area this past year and the pandemic on top of that preventing me from travelling on site (I'm about 350 miles away).
We have 2 offices at a very large location. Our offices are tiny (2 people each) and the larger location is a separate company. So we're very limited when it comes to running new equipment or wires. The two offices are also separated by a few thousand feet.
This location is also very remote so internet options are extremely limited. We were able to get a fiber line but to get service it has to go through the main company's service closet which we do not have access to.
Setup is a Netscreen 5gt on static IP from fiber service feeding two fiber convertors, one convertor for each office. The termination point for the convertor near the offices is about 100 or so feet from the office.
The problem I'm having is that one office is having major printing issues to a network printer. The printer is only like 6 feet from the computer, but I suspect the signals are going up that long chain to the service closet and then back down causing some lag that the printer just can't handle.
So I thought what the hell, temporary solution let me send them a router and talk them through installing it, and essentially double nat their computers and printer to a smaller network inside their office. That's actually seemed to improve the printing situation as print jobs don't leave their room now, but I've run into a secondary issue.
The Netscreen for some weird reason has a 10 device limit on it. We were right at the 10 devices apparently. The 2 computers per office, 2 voip phones per office (I didn't double NAT those), and printer. So 5 devices per office. 10 total. The router is now triggering as an 11th device and causing 1 random device to get dropped.
This seems odd to me since I would think anything behind the second router would only appear as a single device, but the Netscreen logs are showing the devices inside the NAT in the device list even though their on a completely separate subnet. Main network is 192.168.10.*, smaller double nat is 192.168.50.*.
Ultimately I need to replace this Netscreen with something that isn't as limiting on devices, but being a high risk person and not able to get vaccine anytime soon I can't travel there to do the work so I'm trying to do what I can talk people through.
I tried working with the people at the other main company that owns the site, but they don't really want to deal with our network issues. So I'll need to be onsite to replace that main netscreen router.
Is there anything I can do to keep the double NAT devices appearing as a single device to the main router? If this first router worked out I was going to send a second one to the second office and do the same there (double NAT the PC's and printer, keep VOIP on original NAT)
Just trying to figure out how to put a patch on this situation until I can get there and put a more permanent solution into place. Any thoughts or suggestions are greatly appreciated.
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