Quote:Original post by myrdos

Quote:Original post by Hodgman
If your router supports NAT then you don't have to manually port forward anything (unless you are the server). Your router is performing the magic here, not the games.

It still makes no sense to me, NAT is causing the problems here, not solving them. All routers have NAT, it's what makes them routers and not bridges or switches. I agree that there are ways to traverse NAT automatically. But just because there's NAT in your router doesn't mean you have no worries.

Please forgive my double-post, I got some database error when I edited, re-tried, got an error about no password, re-typed password and re-tried, and somehow double-posted.

Yeah, my comment was a bit muddled there. NAT is what makes you need to forward ports, but as I said, if you're the client then you don't have to forward the ports manually (when you connect to the external server, NAT will take care of it and you will have no worries).

BTW you can delete double-posts with the edit button ;)

Quote:All routers have NAT, it's what makes them routers and not bridges or switches.

That's not true at all. Routers work on layer 3 or above. The definition of what makes something a router is somewhat loose, but most definitions typically include one of "being the default gateway for at least one subnet," or "bridging at least two separate subnets" (which boil down to the same thing, more or less). You can do this without any NAT, and in fact, in many cases NAT is not involved at all.

A switch is something that connects different entities at the Ethernet layer, where it forwards packets based on the Ethernet (MAC) address. A bridge is something that creates one larger logical subnet out of two smaller physical subnets (and thus isn't typically the gateway for that subnet). And a "hub" (if you remember those) is like a switch that is always in broadcast mode (i e, forwards all packets to all connections).

NAT is a higher-level functionality, where one of the subnets happens to be in the private space, and IP packets happen to need re-writing. NAT is more a characteristic function of a firewall than of a router, because it will act as a first-layer firewall where connections from the outside can't get in unless they have help from the inside.