Retired Techie
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Cloudflared vs CGNAT Part 1 Packets
Published on April 14, 2023 at 5:30 am by LEWIntroduction
This is the first in a series of posts discussing using Cloudflare Zero Trust (available though a free Cloudflare account) to bypass ISP CGNAT restrictions. In my experience, to date, this is the easiest way to achieve Internet connectivity for local servers, while using providers that have embraced CGNAT.
Carrier Grade (CG) Network Address Translation (NAT) is an outgrowth of IPV4 address exhaustion. We will discuss both CGNAT and NAT in a latter post of this series. In this post I want to start laying some foundations for our future discussion.
At this point I want I will provide a high level overview of network packets. A basic understanding of this is necessary to properly understand how Cloudflare Zero Trust can work for us.
You might have noticed the “d” at the end of Cloudflare in the title. This is the name of the application we will be using, provided by Cloudflare for a variety of Operating Systems (OS).
High level Network Packets
The method used to transmit data over the Ethernet involves breaking that data down into manageable chunks on our computer, transmitting them across the Internet, and reassembling them at the other end. These bits of data are placed into packets. They are referred to as the packets payload. In addition a packet has a header and a trailer. The header and the trailer are appended and modified by the TCP/IP stack.
Headers include information on origin, destination, and reassembly. It is not necessary for our discussion to understand each part of a header. Rather we need to understand the overall function.
An important point to remember, the packet payload can be anything. The purpose of the packet system is to get a file from Point A to Point B, regardless of what it is.
Conclusion
This post is a very quick high level overview of packets as related to our discussion about Clouldflare Zero Trust and CGNAT. It is short because the basic information we need to be aware of is minimal.
I am trying to avoid multiple subjects in these posts, so it is easy to jump to the section you are interested in.
In the next post we will discuss basic NAT and CGNAT.
Cloudflared vs CGNAT Part 1 Packets
Cloudflared vs CGNAT Part 2 NAT Router
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