Don,
Thanks so much for the detailed explanation and the practical example. I'll be using it in the field. We discovered a wing of our building's ethernet drops had been mislabeled by a contractor after a renovation project. I actually think they made up the labels after they plugged everything straight it to switches without a punch down panel. Sloppy. This is really helpful for making it right!
Thanks,
Mike

I couldn't get the video to stop and return to the beginning for me, so I replaced it with a new render. It should play just fine now.
Nathan Copeland
ITProTV

The short answer is no. Dedicated routers are becoming increasingly more rare in production environments. A lot of small office / home office deployments now use their firewalls as a router. Almost every firewall is capable of routing (transparent firewalls being the exception) so having a second device is redundant. In MPLS networks it is not uncommon to see a Layer 3 switch used as the router. However, in environments where you need to do media conversions you will still require a dedicated router. So if you are deploying frame-Relay, T1, E1, ISDN, or other serial based communications you will need a router as you don't typically find those interfaces on firewalls and switches.
Hope that helps,
Don

Greg,
We're filming it right now!
Cordially,
Ronald Wong
Host, ITProTV

Erik,
We were updating some files, hopefully the change has been corrected. Please feel free to open a support ticket with us that may get a response faster than the Q and A on the technical side of things. Thanks for watching!
Cordially,
Ronnie Wong
Host, ITPro.TV

Ok, thank you. So CompTIA now call out seven phases but used to call out six. In the episode, Don and Wes said previous exams had called out seven phases but now called out eight. I guess they simply misspoke. Like your comment here, they said that processing was the phase added in this exam.

Have you tried Clonezilla? we use it often to transfer images to vm session without issues.

Very interesting I knew about mapping static ARP entries but that is an actual use for it :-)
Oddly enough on my Win 8.1 laptop it didn't work. May have been the camera since it already had a different IP on my network as well so I'm not sure what caused me to not connect.
The real weird issue to me though is when I ran arp -d to delete it if you ran verbose arp -av it showed it didn't actually delete it but rather filled the MAC with all 0's and kept it in the table so I ended up getting odd errors and just gave up.

You see this a lot with broadband connections. You are most likely getting NAT'ed on your way through the router, but the cable modem has an entry allowing connections from the IP (or MAC address) of your router. Routers like this typically only have two routes in their routing table. For example, let's assume you are using 192.168.0.0/24 on your internal network. Here's the two routes your router likely has:
192.168.0.0/24 -> Inside ethernet ports
0.0.0.0/0 -> Outside ethernet port
So, even traffic to private IP ranges (10.0.0.0/8, 172.16.0.0/12 and 192.168.0.0/16) will get routed out to the external interface with the exception of whatever private range you are using for your internal network. After that, the cable company likely adds a rule that allows any connection to the modem if it is initiated from the inside interface. The outside interface would generally be secured.
I hope that makes sense. A picture would probably explain it better. Let me know if that doesn't answer your question and I'll draw one up.
Thanks,
Don

Just recently we performed an overhaul on our A+ episodes and it appears a section got left off on that episode. That particular episode has been fixed. Simply navigate over to it and it'll have the first segment in there. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
Nathan Copeland
ITProTV

Hi John,
Funny story about A+ episode ten. I was the guy operating our TriCaster video switcher that day. I made so many errors switching cameras and input sources that quite a bit of editing was needed to make the episode watchable. I didn't want to slow down production, so episode ten sat on the back burner while new content was produced. End the end we decided to abandon episode ten and redo it with a new episode number.
One day I may get around to editing Episode 10: The Lost Episode.
Nathan Copeland
ITProTV

Paul,
I'm now tracking what you're saying. If the 1Gbit was a theoretical limitation, the achievable saturation of fiber optics would be limited to light interference and heat. Put differently, external sources of light, cable imperfections will affect this limitation and the "melting point" of the fiber cabling itself. In a similar manner, copper cabling is limited by EMI and heat as well. So can we achieve better saturation in fiber optics? We can send more signal at one time over fiber optics, we have more saturation (i.e closer to the max).

Cordially,
Ronnie Wong
ITProTV

I had an old gateway PC that had a locked BIOS. I was able to find the model of the board and try to flash its non OEM BIOS. It didn't work in my case and I wouldn't suggest it as you could destroy any chance of it booting again. But I like to tinker with stuff like that now and then.

You're right about the form factors being reused RJ45 and similar is used in other applications as well.
Think about DB9 as the form factor of the connector. The physical style of it, and the pin count and stuff like that. RS232 would describe the communication used very commonly in the DB9 or DB25 connector.

Sorry, I forgot to come back and reply. I have a Gigabyte motherboard. I called them up and their support team told me exactly what you said. The cards will step down to x8. Thanks for your help.