3500 NAT

[Ladislaus]

I have a few Catalyst 3500 switches here and just the other days when I was moving a few end points to another VLAN I by a coincidence spotted an ip nat feature.

Since all switches are in a production environment I am not able to really test it.. but does the Catalyst 3500 XL switch support NAT?

I thought that they were strictly layer 2 switches, even though quite advanced, but still layer 2.

anyone ever used it/tried it out??

/Kristian

[Prashanth Krishnappa]

You might see the commands in the IOS parser(since it runs IOS), but NAT is not supported on the XL switches.

[Ladislaus]

oh, well.. I kind of see your point. I have a SOHO 71 router somewhere, and the "router bgp" command actually exists on it, even though it doesn't support BGP. Issuing "router bgp" on the soho will give me an error message, but when doing an "ip nat inside bla bla" on the Catalyst it doesn't complain, so it seems to be a bit more to it.

And I found this link as well mentioning NAT on catalyst.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/switches/ps637/products_configuration_guide_chapter09186a008007e830.html

[Prashanth Krishnappa]

When you configure clustering on the XL switches, an private ip address is allocated for the cluster members for the commander switch to access the cluster members. There is no configuration needed for this

[Ladislaus]

Would it not be possible then to let the switch do NAT even without a cluster. It would be kind of cool even though the switch would probably not be able to process any large throughputs, right?

Well, I'm going to see if I can free a switch and test it out ;)