NAT vs. IP Masquerade

NAT vs. IP Masquerade

Some sources will tell you that NAT is different from IPMasquerading ”including the IP Masquerade-HOWTO at http://www.linuxdoc.org/ ! They are, however, incorrect. As of RFC 2663, NAT and IP Masquerading are the same thing. Once upon a time, NAT required your own externally addressable subnet (you'd have had to pay for your own class A, B, or C address block). This is, however, no longer true. Official NAT is now more than happy to work with the nonrouted subnets of 192.168.x.x, 172.16.x.x, and 10.x.x.x . While I used to say that for all intents and purposes, NAT is IP Masquerading is NAT, I can now correctly say that they are indeed the same thing. Linux just insists on calling NAT by the name of IP Masquerading. What did old Will Shakespeare say? A rose by any other name ?