I’ve been very vocal about the misinterpretation of NAT for many, many years. Since it’s inception, NAT has been slowly perverted into what many now believe to be a security mechanism. While I do see a reasonable use of IP masquerading in a larger security strategy, this is not the original intent (or implementation) of NAT. What mosts network engineers call “NAT” is actually one to many network port address translation – or taking one public address and “hiding” a number of private (likely RFC1918) addresses “behind” it, using ports to translate traffic and keeping the state of those connections. Given my….vigor for debating the details of NAT, I was invited to discuss this on an episode of The Network Collective Podcast. We get to some of the grimy details with some technical heavy hitters, so if you’re into the debate, it is certainly worth a watch.