this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
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No they fucking don't, that's not what routers do. You don't know what you're talking about.
And don't fucking tell me NAT is for security, either.
That literally is though? NAT stands for Network Address Translation. It'll take you public IP and translate those packets to use your internal one.
If your computer has an address that starts with
169,168, or10there is a NAT somewhere in your network.And it's a "security thing" in the same way that asking someone's name over the phone prevents impersonation haha
That is NAT, yes. But that is only one small function that a router can perform, and not all routers have NAT enabled. You only need NAT if your ISP only allows you to use a single IP address.
That's not actually true. I can create such a network without connecting it to the internet, no NAT. I can create a second network, again, no NAT. I can then use a gateway router that allows any node on the first network to reach any node on the second. That router is still not doing any NAT. It's just passing traffic between two networks.
Yeah you're right, I was simplifying to the point where I was a little mistaken. I was assuming y5ou're network was connected to the Internet and was just a standard residential setup, but this is a much better explanation.
The distinction is important because we are discussing IPv6. A "standard residential setup" with IPv6 would provide the user with an entire subnet rather than a single IP address. We still need a router to pass traffic from the ISP's network to our own network, but we no longer need NAT.
Have you ever chained three Cisco 2600 routers together and then successfully ping'd clients on each end? Do you know what BGP is? OSPF? Do you know the difference between routing and routed protocols?
I know you don't, because people who do don't make the claims you're making.
Not really.
And even as a network amateur I know that its
10.0.0.0/8
172.16.0.0/12
192.168.0.0/16
and 169.254.0.0/16 is not even routable so no dice with NAT.
So someone can connect to you just with with a public IPv4 starting with 192.x.x.x