Thursday, 20 August 2015

When Do We Use NAT?

Similar to Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR), the original intention for NAT was to slow the depletion of available IP address space by allowing many private IP addresses to be represented by some smaller number of public IP addresses.

Since then, it's been discovered that NAT is also a useful tool for network migrations and mergers, server load sharing, and creating "virtual servers." So in this chapter, I'm going to describe the basics of NAT functionality and the terminology common to NAT.

At times, NAT really decreases the overwhelming amount of public IP addresses required in your networking environment. And NAT comes in really handy when two companies that have duplicate internal addressing schemes merge. NAT is also great to have around when an organization changes its Internet service provider (ISP) and the networking manager doesn't want the hassle of changing the internal address scheme.

Here’s a list of situations when it’s best to have NAT on your side:

1.You need to connect to the Internet and your hosts don't have globally unique IP addresses.
2.You change to a new ISP that requires you to renumber your network.
3.You need to merge two intranets with duplicate addresses.

You typically use NAT on a border router. For an illustration of this, see Figure 11.1.

Now you may be thinking, "NAT's totally cool. It's the grooviest greatest network gadget and I just gotta have it." Well, hang on a minute. There are truly some serious snags related to NAT use. Oh—don’t get me wrong: It really can save you sometimes, but there's a dark side you need to know about, too. For a visual of the pros and cons linked to using NAT, check out Table 11.1.


Note: The most obvious advantage associated with NAT is that it allows you to conserve your legally registered address scheme. This is why we haven’t run out of IPv4 addresses—think about it.

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