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Forum Discussion
Is NAT loopback supported on Netgear Orbi RBKE963
Hi all, First time posting here, nice to meet you all. I want to purchase a Netgear Orbi RBKE963 or the B (black) version. I have one specific requirement: - Does it support NAT loopback?...
loopback or hairpinning on the rbre960 still not supported even 3/3/2023 firmware upgrade as recent as of this date. you will need to add port forwarding rules to make it work. THIS BLOWS! good mesh router though.
My suspicion is that there is confusion about how NAT Loopback is supposed to work.
Reference the Wikipedia artlcle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_address_translation
Specifically this section:
NAT hairpinning
NAT hairpinning, also known asNAT loopback orNAT reflection, is a feature in many consumer routers where a machine on the LAN is able to access another machine on the LAN via the external IP address of the LAN/router (with port forwarding set up on the router to direct requests to the appropriate machine on the LAN). This notion is officially described in RFC 2008)
RFC 5128 covers Hairpinning on page 7 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5128 , which then refers to another RFC. (and my brain cells gave up).
The way I read this explanation is that NAT Loopback (Hairpinning) provides a mechanism to validate what will happen when a connection arrives at the public IP from the internet without having to "join another network" to find out. (As with my printer experiment.) What is "supposed" to happen when a connection comes from the internet to the router public IP address, port 21 (or 22, 23, 80,443, 9000 etc)? The router does not run an FTP server (and it does not accept connections from the internet anyway). Which local machine does that connection go to? Answer: if a port forwarding rule is in operation, that rule tells the router where the connection goes to (and what port, too). Without port forwarding
It is also not clear (to me) that Netgear has "removed" any capability. Even if it was a Netgear R9000, as message #6 pointed out, that was running DD-WRT software, not Netgear software.
I really wish someone on the forum who has a 960 could take 10 minutes to test NAT Loopback. i.e.
- Forward port 80 to something on the LAN that has a web server, such as a printer,
- Open a web browser to http://<public IP of router> and
- See if the printer web page comes up.
- Go back to port forwarding and erase the rule so the internet does not pester the poor printer.
