Someone has produced a nifty GUI tool to handle the messier bits of NAT and port forwarding and other things that are yucky to deal with in vi.

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.

This is very cool, but honestly Apple should have done this out of the gate. Whether you’re a novice playing home-ISP for the first time, or a seasoned admin, you expect Apple software to provide elegant ease of use across the board. I have toyed with OS X Server a bit, and it does not deliver on Apple’s brand promise.