Hello, first let me say that I am not a network expert at all, and also thanks to whoever takes the time to read this. I work for a company that makes industrial monorail systems for the laundry industry. We will go into large industrial buildings and install many different network devices including computers, plcs, and remote IO devices. All of our devices need to have static IP address. We need to troubleshoot our devices remotely and most often we accomplish them by making the facility provide us with a dedicated phone line to our main PC, which although slow, is very reliable and simple to set up. Some customer are unwilling to give us phone lines and give us only a network connection and set up a VPN for us. This works but currently it seems that different IP departments set up VPNs differently, and sometimes we need special software to connect. We also don't know how to make these VPN's work without changing all of our network devices IP address (sometimes over 100 devices) to match the IPs of the VPN we are given. We would love to always go with VPN connections over a phone line because of the speed and other features we could use of having our systems on the internet, but would like them to work the same all the time and not require us to change the IP addresses of our devices. We were wondering if there was perhaps a hardware solution for this. Perhaps we could provide our customer with some type of VPN router that we tell our customers to just give internet too? Should we have too network cards in our main PC? I really have no idea how this type of networking works, but I feel that a solution for a problem exists. Thanks.
Larry