* A company joins a bank's financial network and establishes a connection to the clearinghouse servers in the range 192 168.124.0/27 means that the company is using a private IP address range that is allocated to the bank's servers, which are located on a different network.
* An IT technician then realizes the range exists within the VM pool at the data center means that the technician discovers that the same private IP address range is also used by the virtual machines (VMs) at the company's data center, which are located on the same network as the company.
* This creates a problem, as the company cannot communicate with the bank's servers using the private IP addresses, since they are already in use by the VMs. The company needs a way to translate the private IP addresses to public IP addresses, so that the packets can be routed across the internet to the bank's network, and vice versa.
* NAT, or Network Address Translation, is a feature of a router that allows the router to modify the source and destination IP addresses of the packets that pass through it, according to a predefined mapping table. NAT can be used to translate private IP addresses to public IP addresses, and vice versa, to enable communication between networks that use different IP address ranges.
* NAT would be the BEST way for the technician to connect to the bank's servers, as the technician can configure the router to map the private IP addresses of the company to a set of public IP addresses that are unique and routable on the internet, and map the public IP addresses of the bank to a set of private IP
* addresses that are not in use by the VMs. This way, the company can send and receive packets to and from the bank's servers, without any IP address conflicts or overlaps.
* The other options are not correct because:
* PAT, or Port Address Translation, is a type of NAT that also modifies the source and destination port numbers of the packets, in addition to the IP addresses. PAT can be used to allow multiple devices to share a single public IP address, by using different port numbers to identify each device. However, PAT is not necessary in this scenario, as the company can use NAT with multiple public IP addresses, and the port numbers are not relevant for the connection to the bank's servers.
* CIDR, or Classless Inter-Domain Routing, is a method of dividing an IP address space into smaller subnets, by using a variable-length subnet mask (VLSM) that indicates the number of bits that belong to the network prefix. CIDR can be used to allocate IP addresses more efficiently and reduce the size of routing tables. However, CIDR is not a way to connect to the bank's servers, as it does not solve the problem of the overlapping IP address ranges between the company and the bank.
* SLAAC, or Stateless Address Autoconfiguration, is a feature of IPv6 that allows a device to automatically generate its own IPv6 address, by combining a network prefix that is advertised by a router, and an interface identifier that is derived from the device's MAC address. SLAAC can be used to simplify the configuration of IPv6 devices and avoid the need for DHCPv6. However, SLAAC is not applicable in this scenario, as the company and the bank are using IPv4 addresses, not IPv6 addresses.
References:
* CompTIA Network+ N10-008 Certification Study Guide, Chapter 3: Network Operations, Section 3.2:
Network Address Translation1
* Professor Messer's CompTIA N10-008 Network+ Course Notes, Page 19: Network Address Translation2
* Professor Messer's CompTIA N10-008 Network+ Training Course, Video 3.2: Network Address Translation3