Hello, Kenn, and welcome to my blog…

It has been a long time since I last looked at this, but I think we are talking about two different things. MAC cloning allows you to over-ride the embedded MAC address on a device, and replace it with the MAC address from another device.

One to One NAT is quite a different animal entirely. Normally, Network Address Translation is “one to many”: it puts a single IP address on the WAN side of your router. Any in-bound traffic (E.G.: from the Internet) sees just that single IP address, regardless how many devices you have on the other side of the router. If you want (for example), HTTP traffic to go to a particular server behind your router, you use “port mapping”: all the port 80 related inbound traffic can be directed to a single IP address on your LAN.

But what would you do if you wanted to have multiple servers inside your LAN that could handle port 80 traffic? That’s where one to one NAT comes in. Your router responds to several different IP addresses on the WAN side. Traffic to a given specific WAN IP address can then be directed to a specific LAN IP address…. one (WAN) IP to one (LAN) IP.

Now watch: you probably know everything I just explained, and were saying something completely different than what I thought you were…that’s the way communication goes some times 🙂