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Not sure about your first question, but NAT and DHCP are two different animals. You won't be able to exceed the number of DHCP leases you've set in the config, 1, 5 or 13 regardless of NATting.
That setting is on a per-node basis. I use 13 DIRECT as a default on all my nodes. I use a wifi router connected to one of the node ports, giving me 8 WIFI adresses available for devices. I found out the hard way that leaving it at 5 DIRECT only gives me one assignable address via DHCP. In order to give wifi clients direct access to the mesh, you need to set the wifi router to pass through DHCP requests, so the node manages addressing. This is done automatically if you use a BBHN node in AP mode, or DD-WRT is pretty easy to set up for this type of operation.
Using a connected wifi router with it's own DHCP active, and connecting that to a node, does open up the wifi to use as many addresses as you have enabled in the wifi router. That creates a pretty complicated setup that seriously messes up the whole mesh idea, and usually does require NAT. I tried it, didn't like it, and don't do it anymore. Someone with lots of network savvy would probably say I'm a chicken, but I really like the simplicity and rapid setup of direct mode.
A disadvantage I've found when mixing direct and nat modes is that the name services seem to go a bit wonky. When everyone is in direct mode, it's a simple matter to manipulate the advertised services so that computers and devices can join the mesh and quickly find services by name; 'ftp_server', 'pbx', etc. A node in nat mode seems to have a problem resolving names, making advertised services harder to set up. Might just be my attempts at setup, but that's been my experience. |
