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rafaelbn_176840's avatar
rafaelbn_176840
Icon for Altocumulus rankAltocumulus
Apr 11, 2018

BIG-IP CGNAT with PBA - Clear/delete a PBA block

tl;dr - How can I delete a PBA block allocated to a specific client unde the CGNAT module?

Hello guys! Hows everybody?

I'm working on a CGNAT PoC with a client. Currently we're running v12.1.3 on a VE.

The LSN pool is configured as PBA with 512 ports in each block. Everything works fine.

Since it's a PoC there are a lot of tests we do. And I tryed to find a way of clearing/deleting the current block allocated to a specific client.

lsndb list pba shows the current block assigned to the client as follows:

[root@bigip1:Active:Disconnected] config  lsndb list pba
LSN port block allocations
Client                                              Port block                                          TTL
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
10.0.1.100                                          192.168.1.10:2048  - 2559                           271
1 port block entry found.

When I try to delete this block so I can test one more time, I get an error:

[root@bigip1:Active:Disconnected] config  lsndb del pba
Error: PBA entries cannot be deleted

Deleting the client's connection with 'delete sys connection cs-client-addr 10.0.1.100' clears the connection table but not the NAT block.

Question: Is there a way of deleting this entry for the PBA block allocated to the client? If yes how? I looked everywhere I could think of... I know I can configure a timeout (and actually this is what I'm doing right now to speed things up) but when this thing goes live I'll have to configure a longer timeout and this is not a real solution I think...

Many thanks! Rafael

  • Hi Rafael, unfortunately there is no way that blocks can be manually deleted. I have had to configure block lifetime to force blocks to be deleted in my project.

     

  • Wang_261154's avatar
    Wang_261154
    Historic F5 Account

    Hi Rafael, unfortunately there is no way that blocks can be manually deleted. I have had to configure block lifetime to force blocks to be deleted in my project.

     

    • rafaelbn's avatar
      rafaelbn
      Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus

      Thanks Wang! That was exactly the workaround I used. For the PoC no harm was done.

       

      Cheers!

       

  • Hello, Has there been any change enabling the deletion of the PBA entries? Are there any other options besides changing the block lifetime?

     

    • rafaelbn's avatar
      rafaelbn
      Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus

      Hello Valentin! I'm afraid not. The only two things that you can do is configuring a very low block idle time or you can disable the VS that uses the specific LSN pool, delete all clients connections and manually remove de prefix from the LSN pool which is such a hassle.

       

      I have been playing with v14.1.0 and nothing seems different from this.

       

      Best of luck. Rafael