I have two Cisco ASA's, that were originally built by different people. On asa1, when I build a new VPN (site to site or remote access), I need to go to Firewall | NAT Rules, and add a "NAT Exempt rule". The source is my networks, destination is the remote networks, and action is "NAT Exempt outbound traffic ..."
However, on asa2, there are no NAT rules, and VPNs can be built (and work) without adding NAT Exempt rules.
Both have identical interface layouts, with the internal interface having a 100 security level, and the public 0.
My question is, what do the NAT exempt rules do, and why are they required on one ASA and not the other? Thanks!
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Thanks tvman_od,
But could you help me understand why the NAT exemptions are required on one asa, but not the other? Is there some global config option to bypass the need for NAT exemptions? on asa2 there are no NAT rules defined, but all VPNs created work perfectly. On asa1, I need to manually define NAT exemptions to get the same VPNs to work.
If you would post both configs I would be able to come up with better explanations. There is a chance that on asa2 you don't have "Split" tunneling and don't have active NAT at all. So all packets are being forwarded into the tunnel and remote peer is visible ising static not-default route. Or something else.
Just remove public and private IPs and put some bogus figures. remove keys and passwords as well.
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by: tvman_odPosted on 2009-05-14 at 07:58:19ID: 24385679
The answer is in the processing sequience.
Cisco will apply IPSEC before NAT. So you need to instruct NAT not to touch packets for VPN
Full explanations are here:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US