I understand that your goal is to learn something new.
In my opinion ambitious, goal-oriented projects may either backfire or turn you into a legend. There will be many issues along the way and while they are all ultimately solvable, the difficulty may kill your motivation. Alternatively, if you manage to power through, then after some period of learning (potentially years) and keeping the fixation on specific problem you might emerge as a domain expert. Either way it’s a risky bet.
If I might leave some advice for newcomers it would be to learn how to perform some simple tasks & focus on creating projects that you’re confident can be built from things you already know. Over time you’ll increase the repertoire of tasks that you can perform, and therefore be able to build increasingly advanced projects.
Regarding port collisions. In Gatekeeper there are both - a Symmetric NAT & Full Cone NAT. Both are used in tandem. I didn’t mention the former before. Symmetric NAT takes precedence over Full Cone NAT when a connection has already been established (we observed the remote host and have a record of which LAN IP they’re talking to). You’re 100% correct that without Symmetric NAT there would be port collisions and computers in LAN would fight over ports. I actually started out with just the Full Cone NAT only (where collisions can happen) and used it on my network for a couple of weeks. It seemed to work in my home environment but I was a little worried about potential flakiness so I’ve implemented a backup mechanism eventually.
Ah, I also recalled something like that! What you’re saying about NAT assignments being permanent & requiring multiple IPs to avoid collisions. I think there was a course at my university or some Cisco course that taught that… I haven’t been able to find any online sources that would confirm those definitions today but I also remember something along the lines of what you’re describing. I have no idea what happened with those terms. Maybe the “permanent assignments” don’t make much sense in wireless networks WiFi devices can appear and disappear at any time?
Edit: I found it - the proper term for this was “Static NAT” (as opposed to “Dynamic NAT” where the redirections expire).
Right. Port preservation is not a strictly necessary part of Full Cone NAT. It’s a nice feature though. I guess the technical classification would be “Full Cone NAT with port preservation”.
This is very cool indeed. I didn’t knew that. Thanks!