Timeline for If your ISP already has a gateway, why do you need another gateway with NAT to come before a layer 3 switch?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
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| Feb 15, 2023 at 0:42 | comment | added | FrameHowitzer | @RonMaupin, just to make your life more exciting, the Cisco Nexus 6001 Datacenter switch does offer NAT with the layer 3 base software license. I can't imagine anyone wanting to do that on that kind of switch but technically it is possible. I figure they put it in there just to make everyone upset. :) I think I remember a couple of Arista switches that do so as well. But yeah, as a rule, switches do not do NAT, and even when they do, they almost certainly don't do it well enough to make it enjoyable to use. | |
| Feb 15, 2023 at 0:39 | comment | added | FrameHowitzer | @itsmarziparzi, the link in the original post is for a discussion about an HP switch that cannot provide NAT, only limited layer 3 features for basic routing. So the concerns about NAT are basically irrelevant in that discussion but even for that situation, I would still recommend they have a firewall regardless of whether they want to use NAT or if they have enough public IPs to skip using it. The ISPs gateway configuration and features are up to the ISP so the customer has to work with them to figure that part out. | |
| Feb 14, 2023 at 16:40 | comment | added | Ron Maupin♦ | @itsmarziparzi, a switch only has an address for management, and that has nothing to do with switching. Remember that home/residential networking is off-topic here, and any company that wants to stay in business requires a firewall because anything directly exposed to the public Internet will be compromised in short order. Also, it depends on how many public addresses a company has, but, for IPv4, NAT is almost always a requirement, even if a company has multiple public addresses, and switches simply do not NAT. | |
| Feb 14, 2023 at 16:03 | comment | added | itsmarziparzi | Thanks for this super organized answer. So, if we go back to the original question I'm citing, this person simply seems to want his devices to be connected to the internet first and foremost. So, if we ignore the benefits of firewalls, what's missing for that person to be able to connect to the internet is that he has to be able to modify the ISP's gateway to forward all incoming traffic to the switch's IP address. Is that correct? | |
| Feb 14, 2023 at 15:55 | history | answered | FrameHowitzer | CC BY-SA 4.0 |