Hey there,

I am a network administrator of a student dorm. Me and my team (we do this in our spare time) have the task to upgrade and rebuild our dorm intern network. But unfortunately we don't have that much experience with server setup and ip-routing and stuff. So here is the topic I want to ask you about:

Currently our users can connect one device, which is addressed with a static ip-address (so we have quite few external ip addresses). Our boss wants us, to set up a few access points, so that the users can use wifi, provided by us. So far, so good. But we don't have as many ip addresses as we would need to cover at least 2 devices per user. So we thought about this and came up with a idea, to use our server as a router for 400+ ips. So that each student has its own private network with local ip-addresses, routed to one external ip address, special for each user.
So for example it would look like this:
User 1: (192.168.0.100;192.168.0.10)=>153.126.30.101=>Gateway1=>Internet
User 2: (192.168.0.101;192.168.0.50)=>153.126.30.102=>Gateway1=>Internet
...
User 479: (192.168.0.103;192.168.0.105)=>153.126.31.249=>Gateway2=>Internet
User 480: (192.168.0.107;192.168.0.150)=>153.126.31.250=>Gateway2=>Internet

Is this possible and if yes, do you have some advice what we should have a look into? Or can you even explain, what would be the best way to achieve this?

Best regards,
mrgruen

Ideally, you will need to have the students log in. Down the road there are issues for you (who is accessing gay porn sites? Who downloaded malware and infected half the dorm? Who is trying to hack me? Where is the spam coming from?) So you are going to have to get into logging users' activity online.

That's a serious setup, and I wouldn't throw a bit of advice here and leave you to it. Have you the budget to employ outsiders? I got close enough a small university setup and it was by no means a trivial operation.