Why should I used bridged wifi when NAT wifi works fine?

[clawhead]

I'm one of those who've been using Hauke's excellent patches (vmnet.tar, vmmon.tar, vmblock.tar) so that I can use current versions of VMware Workstation for Linux with current kernel versions. I do this mainly so that I can use wireless bridged networking, which hasn't worked properly since about kernel 2.6.22 and WS 6.0. However, since NAT wifi works fine with the stock VMware components, I'm wondering why I even need to worry about bridged networking. Is there some advantage is using bridged wifi as opposed to NAT?

Thanks.

[Peter_vm]

From pure networking point of view, bridging gives direct access to your guest without a need of port forwarding. In some applications that is important.

From operational point of view, there were reports of VMware NAT to be unreliable in some configurations, so it is better to avoid it (depending on circumstances).

[clawhead]

Thanks, Peter, for the good explanation. I suppose I'll resume using Hauke's patches so that I can have my cake and eat it, too. I normally don't upgrade my kernel so very often, so it shouldn't be a big problem.