Hello networking gurus,
I've got a Linux (kernel 3.14) server which acts as a TFTP, NFS and HTTP server for a farm of consumer electronics devices (set-top boxes - STBs). The devices use TFTP to boot their kernels from, then mount their root FSes from the NFS server on our machine, etc etc.
Now, for one esoteric technical reason I am not going to delve in here (just believe me:) , each STB has to be in its own, physically separate, LAN. So the way networking is set up ATM is:
The server has 1 network card which is used to access the rest of the world. It also has 1 network card for each STB it serves - and each of those is connected to a small router, to which the STB + some other devices are connected and form a LAN.
Currently there are 3 STBs connected, and the LANs are 172.16.50.0/24, 172.16.51.0/24 and 172.16.52.0/24. Its all working nicely.
However: the fact that we have 3 different LANs means the very same server has to be accessed as 172.16.50.1 from STB1, 172.16.51.1 from STB2 and 172.16.52.1 from STB3 - and that means that we have a little bit different environment on each STB and each time we - say - upload new RootFS to be used on the STBs, we need to manually edit some configuration file and put the correct IP the server has to be accessed from this particular STB. Not very convenient and error-prone!
That got me thinking: what if we simply configured those three LANs all to be the very same 172.16.50.0/24? From the STB (and rest of the devices in the LAN) point of view everything should be fine, but what about the server's point of view?
Can a Linux server have N different ethernet interfaces, all configured with the same static IP, but each connected to a physically separate LAN?