Obscure use of NAT, possibly

[Chris Davis]

I have an interesting setup that I was hoping to use NAT to work with.

I have a linux box with a quad nic card and another nic card. the single
nic is attached to my network, and the quad nic has 4 sbc(single board
computers, onboard nic, running linux) attached directly using crossover
cables.

The problem is, the 4 sbc's all have the same ip (192.168.1.254), and i
need to be able to address them.

Ive tried setting up the 4 interfaces as 192.168.1.x/24, where x is
1,2,3 or 4 for the 4 machines, all with broadcast 192.168.1.255

I then setup a dummy host route for each interface. So eth1 would have
192.168.1.1 and 192.168.1.11. I then setup a dnat to nat 192.168.1.11 to
192.168.1.254, hoping it would stay on eth1. I did the same for eth2,3 and
4

Then, for example i ping 192.168.1.13, which is eth3, nated to
192.168.1.254. The packets nat fine, but always go out over eth1 as
192.168.1.254, not eth3 as 192.168.1.254 like i want them too

it seems that the packets are rechecked against the routing table and sent
out over the first matching route. Is it possible to force the packet to
stay on eth3?

thanks for the help
chris