NAT

networking

Stands for: Network Address Translation

Rewriting IP addresses in transit, classically to let many private hosts share one public address.

Network Address Translation (RFC 2663) is why a whole home or office can sit behind a single public IP. It comes in flavours, source NAT, destination NAT, port translation, and it complicates anything that assumes the address it sees is the real one.

Also known as: nat, pat, masquerade, source nat, snat, dnat

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