> This should be fairly obvious, because the only thing NAT does is change the apparent source address on outbound connections. It does nothing at all to inboun

> This should be fairly obvious, because the only thing NAT does is change the apparent source address on outbound connections. It does nothing at all to inbound ones (and you can demonstrate this to yourself by setting up a test network in some VMs and NATing traffic between them with Linux and iptables). Absolutely. It's trivial to demonstrate how utterly useless a router configured with NAT, with routing, but without a firewall is. (Useless in the context of a home CPE device for the average home internet subscriber..) As a side note, yes, packets arriving towards your router with a destination address on your LAN will be forwarded by the router piece of your router.. the firewall piece would prevent this. This is independent of the use of/absence of NAT though..