Warning: These are all simple answers to a relatively complex issue. The quickest answer is: Server services are not available behind a NAT. Yes, P2P applications would have difficulty behind NAT, but many are designed with this in mind and have alternate means to work from behind "firewalls" or NAT devices.
-- Generally acting as a client, NAT will run "out of the box" but for many services that require two-way communication outside of a client-side established TCP connection NAT is not a possible solution. Microsoft tried to improve NAT by creating UPNP port mappings which are basically. The short answer is server services are not possible from behind NAT. If you have two nodes both behind a NAT, establishing a two-way communication between them can be difficult or impossible without adding UPNP support or manually mapping ports. In the sense of a decentralized wireless mesh, ip portability is important to roaming and routing. Luckily most protocols designed in the past 8 years have had NAT in mind and are designed to be as "firewall friendly" as possible. Some services, especially connection-less ones, NAT can be a pain in the ass. NAT was never designed to be a part of ipv4 when the protocol was originally drafted. NAT is more of a carefully designed hack to allow node(s) to masquerade behind one true ip address. Of course there are wonderful benefits to NAT in other ways. The key to understanding NAT is an understanding of IP. If you want to figure out this issue more, read up on TCP session handshaking, UDP troubles when multiple machines are masqueraded behind one ipv4 ip, etc. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Christopher Baus" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Ben Efros" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, June 28, 2004 11:53 PM Subject: Re: [RLUG] Wireless Meshing in Reno/Sparks > > The goal: Covering a large area of Reno with wireless signals and secure > > network (and Internet) access. > > Because NAT isn't feasible for all Internet services, I'd like to fully > > support ipv6 routing on the network in addition to SNAT'ing to ipv4 > > internet > > addresses in certain situations. > > > Out of curiosity what services is NAT not feasible for? The only thing I > can think of is running p2p servers or such. > _______________________________________________ RLUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.rlug.org/mailman/listinfo/rlug
