I have a situation where I need to communicate via telnet to multiple devices that have the same IP address. The context is that I am writing a "final test" of devices in a manufacturing facility. These devices go out to the customer with some default IP address and I would like to NOT change this, even temporarily, for this final test.
I'd like to know if/how this is possible to do with one host machine and preferably one router or managed-switch.
I am not super familiar with managed switches or routers. However, I know that routers support NAT (network address translation) and I know that some routers are very configurable. So would it be possible to have a setup like the following:
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A bunch of devices plugged into the ports of a router, each with the same IP address.
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Configuration of NAT on the router to map each of those physical ports to a unique IP on the LAN.
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The application that interacts with the devices telnets to the unique LAN IP's.
If this is possible then what would be the right vocabulary to describe a router with those features?
Best Answer
You could do this with a multiport router that supports NAT but it would take alot of time to configure properly and a router with alot of ports gets expensive.
You could put each port in the switch in a different vlan and then add virtual vlan interfaces on the router. Then you could ping each device from the router specifying the virtual vlan interface as the source. Still alot of work.