Hi,
IP classless in used when for e.g At times, a router might receive packets destined for a subnet of a network that has no network default route.
Suppose a router in network 140.20.0.0 connected to subnets 140.20.1.0, 140.20.2.0, and 140.20.3.0. Suppose the host sends a packet to 140.20.4.1. By default, if the router receives a packet destined for a subnet it does not recognize, the router discards the packet.Therefore, when the host sends a packet to 140.20.4.1, instead of discarding the packet, the router forwards the packet to the best supernet route.
On your second query for PAT,you are right.
Several internal addresses can be NATed to only one or a few external addresses by using a feature called Port Address Translation (PAT) which is also referred to as "overload", a subset of NAT functionality.
PAT uses unique source port numbers on the Inside Global IP address to distinguish between translations. Because the port number is encoded in 16 bits, the total number could theoretically be as high as 65,536 per IP address. PAT will attempt to preserve the original source port, if this source port is already allocated PAT will attempt to find the first available port number starting from the beginning of the appropriate port group 0-5111, 512-1023 or 1024-65535. If there is still no port available from the appropriate group and more than one IP address is configured, PAT will move to the next IP address and try to allocate the original source port again. This continues until it runs out of available ports and IP addresses.
I hope this helps...Kindly rate this post
cheers
Sachin
