Bit of on oddball situation, let me explain our setup before I elaborate on the question.
At my work, we have some small embedded linux devices. We plug into them with USB and it acts as an Ethernet interface that we SSH into to work on the device.
The trouble is, all of our devices are configured to have the same static IP address. Plugging multiple into a single computer makes it very difficult to distinguish which one we are connected to. This causes a huge throughput bottleneck when we need to load large files to a large number of devices. Changing the device’s configuration is not impossible, but difficult when we have more than a couple hundred of them.
I’m wondering if there is a software solution to this problem. Is there some way of combining these multiple USB Ethernet interfaces into a single network, possibly using something like NAT to distinguish between the different devices with the same IP? Maybe something with virtual routers and switches of some kind. Or am I barking up the wrong tree of an X-Y problem?
The other potential solution is to use something like a Raspberry Pi Pico as some sort of bridge that has its own unique IP.
