Re: Verison IPv6 -- I want to stick with IPv4 (was Re: ipv6: static ipv6 address with dynamic network address possible?)

[rhkramer@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, August 10, 2022 04:12:11 AM Curt wrote:
> I never realized that local addresses were fundamentally identical in all
> local networks because there weren't enough addresses in the first
> place, and that NAT was essentially designed to palliate this shortage.

Yes, aiui, NAT was designed because of the address shortage, but ...

> I thought the latter was some sort of security measure.

at least in early versions of NAT (more below) it also provided some level of 
security as it was designed to only forward incoming connections (to computers 
in a LAN) from "known" external computers.

I.e., if a computer on the LAN contacted a computer outside the LAN, NAT would 
allow incoming data from that external computer, but not allow incoming data 
from other external computers.

I'm not sure that current implementations of NAT provide that same 
functionality, (but it is sort of a natural thing -- if something comes in 
from an unrecognized external computer, it would not know which computer (on 
the LAN) to forward it to, so it would presumably just be dropped.

Background: My first encounters with NAT were back in the days (pre-2020) when 
my LAN consisted only of DOS (or Windows) computers.  One (DOS) computer on 
the LAN  ran one or more software packages that (1) interfaced to the dial-up 
(!!) modem and (2) provided the NAT functionality.  

I don't recall if that was one package or two, and in any case, I don't recall 
the package name(s).

-- 
rhk

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