Comment by Dagger2
1 month ago
No, I'm not going to "admit" that, because I know full well that it won't.
It's not like I'm sat here thinking "I know it does block traffic, but I'm going to lie to everyone that it won't". NAT in fact, actually, really and honestly, doesn't block traffic, and I think I've been pretty consistent in saying as much.
You've been consistently wrong, yes. A NAT router box will NOT translate a packet coming from the Internet (so, a packet with a globally routable IPv4 address) arriving on its WAN to the RFC1918 IPv4 address of any box sitting behind it on the LAN side, unless it is arriving on a previously open connection, or on a port the user explicitly asked to be allowed and forwarded - exactly the same behavior of a regular stateful firewall.
Of course it won't do that -- when did I ever claim it would? But that's not the same behavior as a stateful firewall at all.
A stateful firewall would block packets addressed to the router, or to machines behind it. NAT not translating a packet won't do either of those things.