Best practice: Forwarding or Port Address Translation

[bjoern.hoejte]

I have an RV320 to provide routing, and a few services I want to expose to the internet.

When setting up the router, I found 2 features enabling me to expose the services, and both work as expected.

Forwarding: Forward a range of ports to an internal host (e.g. 80-80).

Port Address Translation: Forward one port on the outside to another port on the inside (e.g. 80 -> 80)

The question is this: Is it better practice to use forwarding, specifying multiple ranges of 1 port each (e.g. 80, 443, 25, 22), or is it better to use PAT, specifying the same port on both outside and inside?

[cheveret · Accepted solution]

Both serve the same purpose, it would be easier to keep track of if you just use Forwarding. Port Address Translation is really used if you want to specify different ports or multiple ports to a single port(e.g. 123 -> 80)

[bjoern.hoejte]

So, no actual difference, except in the scope of each function.

My thought was, that they might be implemented differently and have different overhead. This seems not to be the case.

I'll keep my current setup, where I use port forwarding.

Thanks for the answer.