Use of IP Addresses With NAT

Sun Management Center 3.6.1 assumes that the IP address and port of a managed node can be used to uniquely identify and access the managed node within a server context. Furthermore, the software assumes that the local IP address and port of a managed node are authoritative.

As a result of these assumptions, Sun Management Center makes extensive use of IP addresses in both its core operation and its management functionality. Specifically, network addresses are used in the following areas:

• Communication (SNMP, RMI, Probe, MCP HTTP, ICMP)

• Network entity discovery

• Event management

• Identifying server contexts

• Identifying managed nodes, objects, and properties using SNMP URLs

• Managing property contents, for example, the MIB-II module

• Managed property table indices, for example, the MIB-II interfaces table

• Generating localized USEC keys

• Various console browsers and displays

In environments where Sun Management Center components operate across one or more NAT environments, the assumptions regarding the uniqueness and accessibility of the local IP addresses and ports of managed nodes break down. Furthermore, because administrators might be more familiar with the node's public IP address, the use of local IP addresses to identify managed nodes in a NAT environment might no longer be intuitive.