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Describe how NAT is implemented in your home, work, or school environment. Include a description of...

Describe how NAT is implemented in your home, work, or school environment. Include a description of the hardware and protocol components included in your network.

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Answer #1

Primarily NAT was introduced to the world of IT and networking due to the lack of IP addresses, or looking at it from another view, due to the vast amount of growing IT technology relying on IP addresses. To add to this, NAT adds a layer of security, by hiding computers, servers and other IT equipment from the outside world.

When computers and servers within a network communicate, they need to be identified to each other by a unique address, in which resulted in the creation of a 32 bit number, and the combinations of these 32 bits would accommodate for over 4 billion unique addresses, known as IP address. This was named IPv4, and although over 4 billion addresses sounds a lot, it really is not considering how fast the world of computers and the internet has grown.

To circumvent this problem, a temporary solution was produced known as NAT. NAT resulted in two types of IP addresses, public and private. A range of private addresses were introduced, which anyone could use, as long as these were kept private within the network and not routed on the internet. The range of private addresses known as RFC 1918 are;

Class A 10.0.0.0 - 10.255.255.255

Class B 172.16.0.0 - 172.31.255.255

Class C 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.255.255

NAT allows you to use these private IP address on the internal network. So within your private network you would assign a unique IP address to all your computers, servers and other IP driven resources, usually done via DHCP. Another company can use the same private IP addresses as well, as long as they are kept internal to their network. So two companies maybe using the same range of IP addresses but because they are private to their network, they are not conflicting with each other.

However when internal hosts do need to communicate to the public network (Internet) then this is where a public address comes into the equation. This address usually purchased from an ISP is a routable public address everyone can see, which would represent your network gateway. This public address would be unique, no one else would use this address.

Now getting to the point; When a host on the internal network with an internal IP address does need to communicate outside it's private network, it would use the public IP address on the network's gateway to identify itself to the rest of the world, and this translation of converting a private IP address to public is done by NAT. For example a computer on an internal address of 192.168.1.10 wanted to communicate with a web server somewhere on the internet, NAT would translate the address 192.168.1.10 to the company's public address, lets call this 1.1.1.1 for example. so that the internal address is identified as the public address when communicating with the outside world. This has to be done because when the web server somewhere on the internet was to reply to this internal computer, it needs to send this to a unique and routable address on the internet, the public address. It can not use the original address of 192.168.1.10, as this is private, none routable and hidden from the outside world. This address, of 1.1.1.1 would be the address of the public address for that company and can be seen by everyone. Now the web server would reply to that public address, 1.1.1.1. NAT would then use its records to translate the packets received from the web server that was destined to 1.1.1.1 back to the internal network address of 192.168.1.10, and though the computer who requested the original info, will receive the requested packets.

Now you can obviously see the two benefits of NAT. Firstly it would save on the IP addresses we use, as every single computer does not need a public address, and also it would hide these private computers from the outside world. Everyone can only see the public address, the rest is hidden behind this public address. So from the internet only the public address on the external interface of the firewall or router can be seen, and nothing beyond it.

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