Account Services on the Web

Network Address Translation
When your computer is protected by the "NAT", it is assigned an Internet Address which is not visible to any systems outside of the ISU Campus.

In order for your computer to contact any system outside of the ISU Campus, (e.g., facebook.com), all of your Internet traffic destined for off-campus sites is passed through the NAT Router.

The NAT Router modifies the envelope of your traffic to substitute its address (which IS world-visible) for yours and then passes the traffic on to your actual destination.

It remembers this substitution, so when the return traffic arrives, it can reverse the substitution and then pass the return traffic to your computer.

Any traffic arriving at the NAT Router which is not return traffic is ignored. This protects your system from being probed or attacked by systems off-campus.