After we took the the trouble to gain Plus.Net's attention over the issue of a No-NAT service for their business ADSL their support manage has been attentive to the issue. We are seeing some results.
We're told they don't currently support No-NAT on the ADSL routers supplied for their business connection. We were given wrong advice when we signed up for a contract with them.
However to give them their due, Plus.Net have been responsive. They have found us details of a work around which, after a bit of tinkering by us, has provided us with No-NAT connection through the Thompson 585 ADSL router they provided. The device is a bit greedy for static IP addresses. From a block of four IP addresses you are left with one usable address. So we've requested a block of 8 new addresses via Plus.net; let's hope they have a spare 8 IPV4 hanging around.
Even better Plus.net had a spare Netgear N300 Router which is "better at No-NAT". we've received that by courier about 20 minutes ago, so when I've some spare time we'll fire that up too and see if it replaces the Thompson unit.
From the information I gathered from Plus.net it looks like they are ramping up their business offering in terms of support and features like No-NAT but it may be a few weeks/months before that works through into what the public (businesses) see in terms of delivery. The No-NAT configuration workaround we have is not supported at the moment, but if they continue their progress I suspect that will change.
If there is any doubt about the need for No-NAT I can say I've just spent the past 8 working hours resolving a problem where Microsoft FrontPage, used by an external creative, refused to work with one of our servers which is presently behind a NAT firewall. All of our web editing software has no problem, just the damn Microsoft product thinks the world is different. Grrr!!
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