The NATural

Apple's Server Admin software provides only a limited interface to control NAT routing functions. The underlying process, natd, can accept many more arguments. Although Server Admin does not provide an interface to these functions, it does respect all settings that natd supports. The NATural allows you to easily configure these settings.

The NATural was developed in response to my own need to configure NAT routing as an administrator of several Mac OS X Server systems. I quickly became frustrated with editing the natd.plist file each time I wanted to make a change. Furthermore, I was also annoyed that there was no quick and easy way to disable but save IP and Port Forwarding rules. Why couldn't configuring NAT be as easy as configuring the firewall? Now it is!

The NATural allows you to easily configure the following settings (and many others):

• Default Address
• IP Forwarding
• Port Forwarding
• Divert Ports
• Logging Options

• no longer asks for password twice on first launch
• fixed interface menu to read non-physical interfaces
• added "Other..." option in interface menu
• fixed several "Error in helper tool response" errors
• error messages now more specific where possible
• now asks to apply changes if necessary before starting or restarting NAT
• port forwarding rules must now include both a target and destination port, this is a restriction imposed by serveradmin
• punch_fw, custom divert ports, and remote IP/port specifications of port forwarding rules now hidden (ignored by serveradmin)
• expanded help
• log drawer performance and memory usage improved
• better handling of malformed port forwarding and IP forwarding rules