Just to elaborate, with the distinction you make between NAT & PAT, I guess my question would be more accurately phrased as “is static PAT basically just port forwarding?” Since strictly speaking NAT does not involve ports.

In any case, I’ll continue reading, and my hunch is the later articles would naturally clarify this point to me.

NAT is transparent to the hosts. Ping will not tell you whether you are or are not being NATed.

There are other protocols you can use (STUN, for instance), but those aren’t implemented in most operating systems and would have to be installed manually.

Thank you, Surender =)

Thank you, Mircea =).

I’m afraid I don’t have Checkpoint experience and would not be able to speak to the configuration of Checkpoint firewalls. The concepts of NAT explained in this series will still apply to Checkpoint firewalls. They will just call them something different.