The NATural

The NATural is a GUI tool to manage the NAT settings of Mac OS X Server. The NATural allows you to configure many of the settings that Server Admin will pass to natd.

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