The Everything Feed - All Packet Pushers Pods

Today on Tech Bytes we explore frontier virtual patching with sponsor Palo Alto Networks. Palo Alto Networks recently announced frontier virtual patching as part of PAN-OS 12.2. We’ll talk about how this release can help IT and OT organizations deal with the increased speed and scale of vulnerabilities being uncovered. Frontier virtual patching can help ... Read more »

Our October news roundup is a boiling cauldron of consternation. The FBI and the Pentagon suffered breaches, serious exploits are targeting network gear, and researchers discover a lone threat actor who successfully hit hundreds of sites with the help of AI agents. Infostealer malware is impersonating brands such as LastPass to trick users into downloading ... Read more »

Sometimes IT is forced to spend money to do nothing. It might be the cost of evaluating the products and services you don’t end up deploying. Or it’s the cost of scrambling to disable new functionality–mostly AI features these days–in existing apps and services, so it can be evaluated and re-enabled selectively, if at all. ... Read more »

Take a Network Break! We startup with follow-up on global tech news coverage and pronunciations, then pivot to Red Alerts about Dell Container Storage and SonicWall. This week’s news includes a quantum networking controller prototype from Cisco, new rack-scale AI architecture options from Arista, and Cloudflare applying to become a Certificate Authority. Three country-level TLDs ... Read mor...

Christian Adell and David Flores join host Scott Robohn to discuss the intersection of observability, automation, and networking in AI data centers. With AI data centers linking thousands or tens of thousands of GPUs, observability becomes a huge challenge. Scott and guests dig into those challenges, including maintaining lossless networking, managing elephant flows, and leveraging ... Read more &...

Bart Dorlandt discusses the practical applications and architecture of the BGP Monitoring Protocol (BMP) for service providers. Bart has developed a BMP application to help his customers monitor BGP. He talks about how he handles data collection, why it’s important to capture pre- and post-policy filtering, how he deals with excessive prefix volumes, future plans ... Read more »

Lightyear CEO and co-founder Dennis Thankachan shares his transition from investment banking to entrepreneurship and the lessons learned from his early startup failure. He also discusses the creation of Lightyear, the implementation of AI in network operations, and shares some actionable advice for engineers early in their careers. AdSpot Sponsor: Meter Most IT teams are ... Read more »

Ned and Kyler explore the challenges and best practices of running AI agents securely at scale with guest Michael Levan. Together they discuss operational realities of agentic workloads such as specialized AI gateways, semantic routing, sandboxing, and the importance of robust observability practices. AdSpot Sponsor: Gartner The Gartner IT Infrastructure Operations and Cloud Strategies Conference,...

Sponsor HPE Networking comes to Packet Protector to talk about zero trust inline segmentation. This is a feature available in Juniper switches that can segment LAN traffic using group policy tags without the complexity associated with VXLAN or other segmentation mechanisms. On today’s show we dig into how inline segmentation works, common use cases, how ... Read more »

Keith Parsons talks with Mary Bull from Internet2 to discuss the history and widespread deployment of eduroam, a global Wi-Fi roaming service supporting research and education networks. Together they discuss the technical scale of the US eduroam infrastructure, recent load-balancing improvements, and strategies for modernizing campus Wi-Fi. AdSpot Sponsor: Meter Most IT teams are managing ... Read...

What is an AI Factory, and why would an enterprise want to invest in one? Johna and John are joined by guests Thierry Pienaar of HPE and Kaushik Shirhatti of NVIDIA to discuss what an AI Factory is, the business case for it, and who should consider them. They also cover the value HPE’s expertise ... Read more »

Today on the Tech Bytes podcast, you’re invited to The Velocity Room. The Velocity Room is a community for IT professionals with a focus on AI infrastructure and security. On today’s show we talk about this community, what kind of events it runs, and whether it might be worth your time. My guest is Richard ... Read more »

Take a Network Break! We discuss listener follow-up on orbital data centers, and hit the Red Alert for a string of Citrix NetScaler vulnerabilities. Visa releases its homegrown agentic AI harness for finding and remediating vulnerabilities as open source software, a bad change borks Azure networking services in 19 regions around the world, and Gluware ... Read more »

Today’s show puts the “heavy” in Heavy Networking with a discussion about Multipath Reliable Connection (MRC). MRC is about getting an even distribution of RDMA traffic across equal cost multipath links in massive data centers, and doing so over plain old lossy Ethernet. Ethan, Drew, and guests discuss how packet spraying, resilience to link and ... Read more »

What will network operations look like in 2030, and how can teams embrace agentic AI without losing operational control? In this sponsored episode, Rekha Shenoy and Irfahn Khimji of BackBox speak with Scott Robohn about the shift toward agentic NetOps, balancing automation with backup and rollback strategies, and the evolving role of network engineers. Episode ... Read more »

Thank you for sending in even more follow ups! On today’s show, Holly and Ethan respond to listener comments and corrections on Multicast, MPLS, NAC, Twisted Pair Cabling, and more. A big thank you to everyone who sent in responses. If you’d like to leave a comment about this comments episode, you can do so ... Read more »

Ed and Nick explore why developers and SREs often become the bottleneck when transitioning to IPv6-only environments. They share practical strategies for bridging the communication gap between network and application teams, including early collaboration, data-driven monitoring, and fostering open dialogue. Episode Links: Watch this episode on YouTube

Garrett Masters talks with Eric Chou about the concept of the AI-Augmented Engineer. Together they discuss how IT professionals can use Python and NetMiko to automate tasks and even connect AI directly to lab environments. Garrett also shares practical advice on prompt engineering, the importance of context management, and how engineers can safely adopt AI ... Read more »

William Collins and guest Drew Meli explore the realities of buying enterprise SaaS and infrastructure. They cover the common engineering misconceptions about enterprise sales, navigating rigorous security reviews, establishing clear proof of value criteria, and how AI is reshaping buying behaviors. AdSpot Sponsor: Gartner AI is rewriting your cloud architecture, your operating model, and your ......

In-house data centers are a hot topic again! Companies of all sorts are repatriating cloud workloads. Many want to ramp up in-house AI development, training, and production deployment. However much (or little) you know about building a data center, the rules have all changed in the last few years. From political/regulatory concerns to economics to ... Read more »

AI models have proven very effective at finding software vulnerabilities. This has dramatically increased the number of people (and agents) who can find bugs. But the number of experts who can verify and validate those bugs, and write fixes, has stayed exactly the same. On today’s Packet Protector we talk with Trey Ford, Chief Strategy ... Read more »

The early exuberance of AI adoption has run up against hard-nosed business requirements around managing costs, protecting sensitive data, and matching the right model with the right job at the right price. On today’s show, sponsor Broadcom is here to make a case that private cloud is the place for AI inferencing workloads. We talk ... Read more »

Take a Network Break! We sound a red alert for active exploits against Check Point’s Secure Gateway. On the news front, a Cisco survey says 51% of organizations run agentic AI in production, Selector announces agentic AI additions to its AI network observability platform, and NetBrain rolls out new AI agents to evaluate changes and ... Read more »

“My goal in life is to say it’s not the network!” says Ben Shapiro, senior network engineer at Eugene (OR) School District 4J, the 6th largest school district in Oregon. He joins host Scott Robohn to discuss how to balance complexity, resiliency, legacy devices, security and more in an educational setting. He’s also a MistFit with ... Read more »

Drew and Ethan talk with Kevin Nanns about his journey from network engineer to network architect. Kevin shares his experience grappling with the shift in responsibilities, increased pressure, and communication and management challenges associated with his new role. They also discuss his content creation work on TikTok and his strategies for translating complex technical concepts ... Read more &#1...