Suppose I have an ethernet capable device that has a hard coded IP address in it. I have software that works with the device, which could be configured to work with practically any IP address for the device, but as stated, the device always comes the same fixed address.
Now here's the problem: suppose I want to use more than one of these devices in my network. An example of two suffices to illustrate the problem. Obviously there's an immediate IP conflict. I could run two instances of the software, but there's no way to disambiguate which instance of the software should associate to which device.
I think what might work is to use a layer 3 capable device to essentially do network address translation, but I don't need to NAT an entire LAN, like most commodity routers seem designed to do. What I'd really like to do is apply static NAT on a per-port basis. I'd like to tell the router(?), "you see this device plugged into port 2, that thinks it's 10.1.1.1? Make it look like 192.168.1.2, and this other one plugged into port 3, that also thinks it's 10.1.1.1 - make that one look like 192.168.1.3" .. and so on. (assuming of course that the rest of my LAN is 192.168.1/24)
I've worked with a 'switch' that does VLANs and routing domains, but didn't appear to have the capability to translate addresses between the VLANs. Space and cost constraints preclude dedicating an entire NAT-capable router to each device.
So is this kind of thing possible? If so, what kind of device does one need to get it? Heck, maybe the switch I'm working with can do it, I just don't know exactly what to look for and didn't recognize it! But if it's simply not done, I'd alternately like to know why not, to figure out where the flaw in my thinking would be. Doesn't seem impossible, though.