The nodes outside of the lan don't have to connect to you, if you want run a local node/wallet. They only have to know your public ip in order to "allow" your access.
But the nodes you are connecting to have to be public, of course...
Edit: if you want to make your computer public available you have to configure your routers routing tables.
Thanks a lot for the answer! So the two nodes behind different NAT servers have no chance to connect. If I have my PC behind a NAT, and have no access to router to configure it, I have to search for peers running on public machines only...
It looks like people should specify whether whey run public IP or not, when they ask for nodes in nodesharing channel... so there will be less issues.
One more question: lets say I have access to router, so can forward traffic to my PC, but I do not want to forward all the traffic. Which port should I forward, so IOTA wallet can be connected from outside? In other words, which ports IOTA uses? Is it one port or many? TCP or UDP?
Thanks for help. I know if this goes to technical, I'll have to go to Slack...
I did not try IOTA, but with byteball there's no problem to run within a subnet, behind the NAT. The nodes communicate well and have no issue. Maybe I should try IOTA for that too.
I also have Byteball wallet successfully running in a LAN behind a NAT... Actually with Byteball its easy, as it just works. With IOTA it would be tricky, as you have to manually find nodes, which are nowhere publicly available. You have to go to Slack, ask for nodes and somehow make sure you find only peers who run node on machines directly connected to Internet and running public IP address... As you need to find 5-9 nodes of that kind (involving a chat with every other node owner, just to find out whether he runs public IP or not and whether he agrees to connect to node like yours, expect about a week of setup time
I am not complaining, as I understand it is the way it is, and there are good reasons for removal of auto peer discovery and introducing this notorious manual node search instead. For me the tech part is easy, chat part is tiresome. Hopefully light wallet comes soon.
Do you realize what you are banging on about is plain stupid?
I am a pernsioner old man and not a developer anymore, but even I can see the Byteball project uses this library https://github.com/bitpay/bitcore-p2p/blob/master/lib/peer.js. As you can see the bitcore peer module connects to the Bitcoin network via a websocket server. Websocket is a centralized solution. Meanwhile if I understood correctly the IOTA peers connect to each other directly without a central service provider. You compare apples with oranges. Do you realize at all that there is no NAT traversal needed as the websocket uses the HTTP protocol? https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6455
I am a long time critics of IOTA, but what you are banging on about is a complete nonsense. You are asking why a peer cannot be as convenient as a centralized, websocket based solution. Normally there is a tradeoff between usability and security.