NAT pool and outside interface

Hello Jelanimanzili

The quick answer to your question is no. The detailed answer is below:

The IP address of the outside interfaces does not have to be on the same subnet as the range of NAT pool IP addresses. Your configuration is correct. However, in order for it to work, the ISP that has given you the outside pool of addresses must have configured routing on its end to be able to route translated packets to the internet.

Concerning your second question, if you want to ping the outside interface of the router from an inside device, what happens depends on the order of NAT operations. According to Cisco, routing occurs before NAT translation. (see http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/ip/network-address-translation-nat/6209-5.html).

This means that router checks its routing table for a route to the outside address before it continues to translate the packet. Therefore, it is important that the NAT router has a valid route for the outside network and the route to the destination network must be known through an interface that is defined as NAT outside in the router configuration. Since the 209.165.201.0/30 network is directly connected and is therefore in the routing table, NAT translation will occur when pinging to 209.165.201.0/30. So no additional configuration is necessary to reach such addresses.

I hope this has been helpful!

Laz