NAT doesn't get the hate it deserves for stopping people from running their own servers.
I remember being being 18, making my first websites using the LAMP stack and not understanding why my friends were unable to access them from their homes. I knew the basic workings of the IP protocol, but hadn't read about NAT, and the responses online talked about "public and private IP addresses", which made no sense to me -- "Aren't all IP addresses supposed to be public? Isn't that how the protocol works?"
Even after learning about how NAT works, I had no way to work around it, as my ISP blocked the router's web interface and I was unable to do port forwarding.
I would bet that there are at least dozens of millions of people that didn't pursue a career in IT because of NAT. We should ask ourselves if collectively allowing NAT to be what it is was a good decision in the first place.
I remember being being 18, making my first websites using the LAMP stack and not understanding why my friends were unable to access them from their homes. I knew the basic workings of the IP protocol, but hadn't read about NAT, and the responses online talked about "public and private IP addresses", which made no sense to me -- "Aren't all IP addresses supposed to be public? Isn't that how the protocol works?"
Even after learning about how NAT works, I had no way to work around it, as my ISP blocked the router's web interface and I was unable to do port forwarding.
I would bet that there are at least dozens of millions of people that didn't pursue a career in IT because of NAT. We should ask ourselves if collectively allowing NAT to be what it is was a good decision in the first place.