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docs: describe AWS hard NAT #13205

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docs: describe AWS hard NAT
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@spikecurtis
spikecurtis committed May 8, 2024
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50 changes: 50 additions & 0 deletions docs/networking/stun.md
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Expand Up @@ -122,3 +122,53 @@ originate. Using these internal addresses is much more likely to result in a
successful direct connection.

![Diagram of a workspace agent and client over VPN](../images/networking/stun3.png)

## Hard NAT

Some NATs are known to use a different port when forwarding requests to the STUN
server and when forwarding probe packets to peers. In that case, the address a
peer discovers over the STUN protocol will have the correct IP address, but the
wrong port. Tailscale refers to this as "hard" NAT in
[How NAT traversal works (tailscale.com)](https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works).

If both peers are behind a "hard" NAT, direct connections may take longer to
establish or will not be established at all. If one peer is behind a "hard" NAT
and the other is running a firewall (including Windows Defender Firewall), the
firewall may block direct connections.

In both cases, peers fallback to DERP connections if they cannot establish a
direct connection.

If your workspaces are behind a "hard" NAT, you can:

1. Ensure clients are not also behind a "hard" NAT. You may have limited ability
to control this if end users connect from their homes.
2. Ensure firewalls on client devices (e.g. Windows Defender Firewall) have an
inbound policy allowing all UDP ports either to the `coder` or `coder.exe`
CLI binary, or from the IP addresses of your workspace NATs.
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Maybe we should list where the binary is commonly found on each platform.

  • Linux: /usr/bin/coder
  • Mac: unsure where brew puts it
  • Windows: C:\Program Files\Coder\bin\coder.exe or "C:\Users\dean\AppData\Roaming\Code\User\globalStorage\coder.coder-remote\bin\coder-windows-$ARCH.exe"

3. Reconfigure your workspace network's NAT connection to the public internet to
be an "easy" NAT. See below for specific examples.

### AWS NAT Gateway

The
[AWS NAT Gateway](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/vpc-nat-gateway.html)
is a known "hard" NAT. You can use a
[NAT Instance](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/vpc/latest/userguide/VPC_NAT_Instance.html)
instead of a NAT Gateway, and configure it to use the same port assignment for
all UDP traffic from a particular source IP:port combination (Tailscale calls
this "easy" NAT). Linux `MASQUERADE` rules work well for this.

### AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS)

The default configuration of AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) includes the
[Amazon VPC CNI Driver](https://github.com/aws/amazon-vpc-cni-k8s), which by
default randomizes the public port for different outgoing UDP connections. This
makes it act as a "hard" NAT, even if the EKS nodes are on a public subnet (and
thus do not need to use the AWS NAT Gateway to reach the Internet).

This behavior can be disabled by setting the environment variable
`AWS_VPC_K8S_CNI_RANDOMIZESNAT=none` in the `aws-node` DaemonSet. Note, however,
if your nodes are on a private subnet, they will still need NAT to reach the
public Internet, meaning that issues with the
[AWS NAT Gateway](#aws-nat-gateway) might affect you.
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