if you want your internal hosts to be accesable e.g if you running a webserver or mail server portforwarding is the way to go !!
Ziggy -----Original Message----- From: Nonya [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, February 11, 2002 8:03 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Beginner NAT question This may sound like a really odd question but its just something thats confusing me: I've set up an old 486 running FreeBSD to be the gateway for my home network via my cable modem. The 486 is running natd so that any of the machines on the inside can use it as a gateway which works fine. Eventually I'm going to set up port forwarding so that I can run a web server, mail server etc on the internal hosts and they can be accessed from the internet, but at the moment I've done no static port mapping so the only mapping that occurs is dynamic, when an internal machine makes a request from the gateway. My question is this - does this setup mean nobody can access my internal hosts at all (because any tcp/ip packets sent to my one public IP will be dealt with by the 486 as if they were intended for it) or can the internal hosts be accessed in some way? Given that they're running on 192.168.*.* address I don't see anyway packets can be passed across to the Internet so that the 486 will interpret as being for them Please note, I am NOT thinking of using this as a security model (thats what God gave us ipfw for) but I'm just finding it hard to get my head round what natd actually does in such circumstances Cheers Nonya "Its all good, all of the time"
