Nat

[fatboyjim]

Network Address Translation...

Can anybody explain what this actually does, the manufacturer of my router says that this was installed and configured in factory and should work fine

I don't know what it does so I can't check!

Apparently it works like a firewall, I don't know

Jim

[Fuze]

"Short for Network Address Translation, an Internet standard that enables a local-area network (LAN) to use one set of IP addresses for internal traffic and a second set of addresses for external traffic. A NAT box located where the LAN meets the Internet makes all necessary IP address translations.
NAT serves three main purposes:

Provides a type of firewall by hiding internal IP addresses
Enables a company to use more internal IP addresses. Since they're used internally only, there's no possibility of conflict with IP addresses used by other companies and organizations.
Allows a company to combine multiple ISDN connections into a single Internet connection. "

-Webopedia

[bob]

It is unlikely you would want to use nat for a home connection.
- You would need to get from your ISP more than 1 valid IP address - that costs money.

If you decide you need more than 1 ip address (you want to host 2 or more seperate websites or something) you can use nat to let the internet see the valid ip addresses from your ISP and have your computers on a private network (192.168.1.0 or whatever)

You can build your internal network any way you want so all computers connect to each other. Then use nat to make any computer on your private network appear on the internet with the valid internet address.

Nat needs the ip addresses entered before your router would be considered "configured". If it is configured then you could check by looking at your ip address on your computer. If it is a private address that was obtained from the router using dhcp then it is configured.

[fatboyjim]

So I'd definitely need to obtain a specific IP range from my ISP?

Thanks for the comments

Jim

[glc]

ALL home grade broadband sharing routers use NAT to share out your one IP address with your network. If the router works and you are able to share the internet and share files on your LAN, your NAT is working.

[bob]

Seems I over thought the answer - only one Ip address is needed for simple nat.