NAT32 Reference Manual

The NAT32 WEB Interface

Each NAT32 Console window contains an embedded Internet Explorer Browser Object to display HTML content. This functionality is provided by a small dynamic link library web2.dll written entirely in C.

The user can switch between Web Mode and Console Mode at any time by using the switch command or by clicking the Switch icon in the Toolbar.

In Web Mode, the toolbar contains several additional icons, including navigation icons, a Favourites Viewer icon and a URL combobox. Favourites are the Internet Explorer bookmarks of the current user. They are displayed in a standard Open File dialog box, and clicking any bookmark will display its content in the Web window of the current Console. The URL combobox contains two sections: the links contained in the file typed.txt, which is simply a list of URLs that the user can customise as desired, and the Typed Urls from the Windows Registry. The user can browse to any URL in the combobox simply by selecting an entry.

The NAT32 Web Interface allows the execution of any NAT32 command simply by clicking a specially formatted link in a Web page. The mechanism works only in conjunction with the NAT32 Web Server and allows any desired functionality to be incorporated into a set of Web Pages. A small set of such pages is presupplied, but the user could customise those pages to achieve any desired "look and feel".

The Active Content feature understands HREFs of the following format:

shell?cmd=command+arg1+arg2+...
tcl?cmd=command+arg1+arg2+.....
java?cmd=command+arg1+arg2+....

The command field in the above list can be any command that the NAT32 Shell understands, followed by the command arguments, which are seperated by + characters instead of the usual white space.

TCL scripts and Java applets are also supported. TCL scripts are often used to perform a sequence of actions, such as setting Permanent Port Mappings so that selected unsolicited incoming traffic will be sent to a particular private machine. Java Applets can be executed, and a sample Java class explorer.class is supplied. Note that, contrary to popular belief, Java Classes are quite platform dependent, and even simple classes like the one above will only run correctly under the Java Virtual Machine for which they were written.

Dynamic Content can be generated by specifying NAT32 commands in standard HTML 4.0 Objects as in the following example:

<object type="text/x-scriptlet"
width=480 height=180
data="shell?cmd=netstat">
</object>

The above script produces the following content:

Certain restrictions are enforced to ensure that commands that open a window on the NAT32 machine are only executed if they are submitted from the localhost IP address.

Pages served by the NAT32 Web Server contain a special version of the nat32e.gif image (if present). The server replaces all references to that image with references to nat32b.gif. Therefore, all such pages can be identifed by the image on the right.

HTTP Server Permanent Port Mappings Shell TCL Web