2. Where is the official Web Site and List?

There are three official sites:

• Thanks to Filewatcher.
• Thanks to The Samba Team and SGI.
• Thanks to Harald Welte.

You can reach all of them using round-robin DNS via http://www.netfilter.org/ and http://www.iptables.org/

For the official netfilter mailing list, see netfilter List.

2.1 What is Network Address Translation?

Normally, packets on a network travel from their source (such as your home computer) to their destination (such as www.gnumonks.org) through many different links: about 19 from where I am in Australia. None of these links really alter your packet: they just send it onward.

If one of these links were to do NAT, then they would alter the source or destinations of the packet as it passes through. As you can imagine, this is not how the system was designed to work, and hence NAT is always something of a crock. Usually the link doing NAT will remember how it mangled a packet, and when a reply packet passes through the other way, it will do the r