Sunday, January 24, 2016

What is NAT?

NAT is Network Address Translation. A network device such as a firewall or router assigns public address to one or more computers inside a private network.

In Home computers, for example, if you have a number of connected (wired/wireless) computers then each of them can have a public address. These computers can share resources like files/folders inside the private network. A router is involved in routing the traffic between them.

Here is an example of 3 computers (wi-fi) forming the internal network with the router as the default gateway.


NAT conserves the number of public addresses. In the example you would have required 3 public addresses to connect to Internet.
 

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