baconomatic

I used to work at a place about 10 years ago where we had a cluster of six Android devices that we had used for our SMS gateway. At the time it worked fantastic, we eventually rolled off it to a different service. Somehow, we never ran into issues with carrier.

The proxy is part of our platform so the source isn't public, but the concept is straightforward and the blog post covers the core logic. Happy to answer questions about the approach if you're building something similar!

Yeah IPv6 would solve this because we wouldn't have to go through the proxy at all, since each VM could get their own. Unfortunately IPv6 isn't quite as supported as we'd like.

Yep, that's exactly right!

Good call, I should have made that more clear. Article updated!

You definitely can once the device has a hostname set in set-inform. The MAC proxy is just for initial adoption where a device may only know the IP. Such as when you use DHCP Option 43.

Thank you! DNS-based adoption works well for this. You point the unifi hostname at the tenant's subdomain and the Host header handles routing from there. We also have a DHCP Option 43 generator for setups where DNS isn't practical.

It would definitely be simpler, however the routing issue still stands. You would need to have a public IP for every VM, which is getting less practical. The MAC-based proxy makes it so we only need one IP and we can worry about the routing within our platform instead.

Now that would be interesting! Multi-vendor support is on the radar, but haven't started looking into it much yet.

Thanks for calling it out!

Yep, once you set-inform the host header handles the routing. This in particular is most useful for things like DHCP Option 43, where devices only get an IP.

Sorry about that, I typically use light mode, fixed and deployed!

You might be onto something there! But yes, good catch, I'll get that updated.