Lv_InSaNe_vL

And having a friend-to-friend piracy network absolutely pushes you into “power user” territory lmfao

Yeah you’re right, I was simplifying to the point where I was a little mistaken. I was assuming y5ou’re network was connected to the Internet and was just a standard residential setup, but this is a much better explanation.

That literally is though? NAT stands for Network Address Translation. It’ll take you public IP and translate those packets to use your internal one.

If your computer has an address that starts with 169, 168, or 10 there is a NAT somewhere in your network.

And it’s a “security thing” in the same way that asking someone’s name over the phone prevents impersonation haha

All routers have NAT, that’s sort of their entire role. Are you maybe talking about “double NATing” where you have your router behind the ISP modem/router?

As far as I’m aware Skype does not support actual VOIP calling anymore, at least according to Microsoft and the couple forums i just skimmed through. But it’s been probably 10+ years since I’ve actually used it or interacted with anyone who used it haha

And I was talking about static IPs, which are different. And at least in the US (in single family homes) its crazy unlikely that your router is behind any NAT. Unless you’re talking about CGNAT but anything short of a dedicated fiber run or dedicated wavelength (which are not options for residential people) you will be behind a CGNAT anyways. Even if you have a public IP.

And, anecdotally. In the last 5-8 years I don’t think I’ve had any issues with NAT when hosting games, it’s just firewall rules or my public IP changed. But ymmv on that one when playing 22 year old games haha

Xfinity in the states is like that too. Technically I don’t have a static but it’s only changed twice in 4 years or so.

Once was during a really really bad storm which took power down in my state for days so I don’t blame them, and the other one was when they did work on my local node but they sent out an email and a letter before hand lol

There’s pretty much no use for a normal person, just for business and power users like the person above you.

For your couple examples, nobody at home actually runs VOIP except a couple nerds just like nobody has home phones except a couple of old people. And quick game servers don’t need statics, and if you are hosting something long term that would push you into the power use space.

This is some crazy good advice. In the software dev/IT fields I preach about premature optimization to my reports all the time.

You can’t optimize something that doesn’t exist. Figure out exactly what you want to build (so you want video streaming mostly it sounds like, then you can figure out how to build it (probably either a NAS or just a tower with a bunch of drives in it. And then Plex/Jellyfin). Then, after you build it, you can use it.

You’ll only find things to fix/make better by actually using it. Focus on getting the thing done, then you can optimize.