The Everything Feed - All Packet Pushers Pods

Today we discuss how to secure your all-powerful root accounts on the three major public cloud providers: AWS, Azure, and GCP. Our guests today, Ned Bellavance and Kyler Middleton from the Day Two Cloud podcast (soon to be Day Two DevOps podcast), describe the struggle of securely managing several root accounts at once. They take ... Read more »

Asking questions is a critical skill whether you’re an outside consultant or on an internal IT team. In today’s episode, Greg and Johna review what kind of questions to ask and how to ask them. They discuss the ‘Five Whys,’ identifying points of invariance, discovering unknown unknowns, and watching out for landmines. They also cover ... Read more »

Take a Network Break! We start with an announcement from Greg about his impending retirement. After we dust ourselves off from that, we pivot to this week’s tech news. Fortinet acquires a company to bolster its offering in securing cloud deployments and workloads, Cisco announces an Ikea-like kit to build AI infrastructure on prem, and ... Read more »

When it comes to SSE, it’s helpful to know the vendor’s history and approach to understand if it’s the best fit for your organization. HPE Aruba’s SSE journey started when it acquired Axis Security, a company focused on solving the problem of third party access. Because of that focus, HPE Aruba says its SSE is ... Read more »

Fortinet’s Unified SASE provides consistent security controls and policies both for traditional campuses and the hybrid workforce.. Nirav Shah joins us to explain how Fortinet is positioned to do this: a foundational software developed for 20 years, a network of over 140 POPs, a security lab with over 1,000 researchers, continuous ZTNA verification proxies, and ... Read more »

If you don’t blame “destination unreachable” messages on DNS servers, are you even a real network engineer? All joking aside, Johannes Weber joins the show today to teach us how to use ICMPv6 to troubleshoot network issues, pinpointing if the problem is within your network or outside of it. He walks us through identifying possible ... Read more »

In part two of Scott Robohn’s interview, Scott tells us about his experience starting his own business and co-founding the Network Automation Forum and the AutoCon conference series. He describes the strong desire among many engineers to drive network automation forward, and how AutoCon creates a community to help make that happen. He and Eric ... Read more »

Natural disaster responders, large event planners, and rural kids trying to do their homework all have something in common: they need a little extra help to get connected. COWs, COLTs, and WOWs can do just that. Mark Houtz joins Keith Parsons to explain how and why COW operators do what they do. First, he explains ... Read more »

Drew and JJ have recovered from the overstimulation of the RSA expo floor and are ready to discuss their takeaways from the conference. They discuss the surprising emphasis on microsegmentation and storage backups, and the not-so-surprising focus on IoT security and AI-assisted products. They also pull back the curtain on what the conference’s own SOC ... Read more »

Take a Network Break! Johna fills in for Drew for a second week. We start with a follow-up on last week’s take on HPE and 5G. With this week’s HPE announcement that it’s launching Aruba Networking Enterprise Private 5G, we see that its offloading of OSS/BSS was to streamline, not a step away from its ... Read more »

When a network for a new location needs to come online, networkers are faced with a predictable (and painful) to-do list: deal with ISPs, design and implement floor plans, obtain hardware, configure devices, etc. Meter’s Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) is here to take care of all that for you. Meter’s CEO Anil Varanasi joins the show to ... Read more »

Greg Ferro, co-founder of Packet Pushers, is signing off. After years of frustrating health issues, he’s decided to fully step back from podcasting and industry analysis to take care of himself. After 14 years, today is his last appearance on Heavy Networking. In this parting episode, Greg shares his final dose of incisive insights and ... Read more »

Welcome to a crossover episode with the Day Two Cloud podcast! Eric Chou was there for the birth of the public cloud. Before DevOps or SREs were a thing, before Azure was Azure, Eric was a network engineer for Amazon, helping them build out their retail technology platform. Of course, that platform evolved into the ... Read more »

Eric Chou was there for the birth of the public cloud. Before DevOps or SREs were a thing, before Azure was Azure, Eric was a network engineer for Amazon, helping them build out their retail technology platform. Of course, that platform evolved into the world’s leading public cloud–AWS. Eric joins the show today to tell ... Read more »

To be an effective technologist in a corporation, your efforts need to be aligned with the business strategy of your organization. In today’s episode, Johna and Greg show you how to do this, even if your organization has no written business strategy. They explain how to “read the tea leaves” to tell if your organization ... Read more »

Matter is an IoT protocol that has security and interoperability baked into it. Steve Hanna, the chair of the Product Security Working Group in the Connectivity Standards Alliance, joins the show today to walk us through this IP-based protocol for smart home devices. He compares Matter to an armored car, delivering a valuable payload securely ... Read more »

Take a Network Break! Johna fills in for Drew this week. We start with HPE adapting to the 5G market and unloading BSS/OSS tools to HCLTech. Dell financial results suggest AI problems. ISP Windstream replaces 600,000 routers destroyed by malware. France, Germany and the Netherlands lead the largest-ever police action against botnets with the help ... Read more »

Today on Heavy Networking, sponsored by Broadcom, we talk about VMware’s transition under Broadcom’s ownership. The acquisition has led to big changes that rolled out very quickly, including how VMware sells products and services – subscription only licensing, bundles of products, a hard stop on sales of existing licenses, overhaul of license issuance, and more. ... Read more »

Scott Robohn is responsible for so much of the current buzz and awareness of network automation. Today, we sit down with the co-founder of Network Automation Forum to learn about his own journey. We chat about his education and the question of if college degrees are necessary. We also talk about his experience at big ... Read more »

If you’re an Active Directory administrator or part of an enterprise network team working with one, this episode is for you. Ed literally wrote the book “Practical IPv6 for Windows Administrators” so Scott has fun interviewing him as today’s guest. Ed goes over how to diagram out your IPv6 deployment, including address allocation and making ... Read more »

Tabletop security exercises can help organizations game out their response to a security incident. From the technical and business considerations to legal and PR implications, a tabletop exercise, like Dungeons and Dragons, lets you play-test attack and defense scenarios. Johna Till Johnson, CEO of Nemertes consulting firm and co-host of the Heavy Strategy podcast, joins ... Read more »

A cardboard box with a circuit printed on it that harvests just enough power to activate a radio and have it chirp something out a short distance: that’s just one of the cool products and 802.11 standards that stood out at this year’s Wi-Fi World Congress USA. Drew Lentz joins the show to recap the ... Read more »

Welcome to a crossover episode with the Heavy Strategy podcast! Firing the wrong person, mistakenly rebooting core switches in a massive network, not passing the CCIE exam– today we talk all about failure. For this conversation, we’re joined by fellow Packet Pushers Kyler Middleton and Ned Bellavance, hosts of the Day Two Cloud podcast. We ... Read more »

Firing the wrong person, mistakenly rebooting core switches in a massive network, not passing the CCIE exam– today we talk all about failure. For this conversation, we’re joined by fellow Packet Pushers Kyler Middleton and Ned Bellavance, hosts of the Day Two Cloud podcast. We swap stories, discuss response and prevention, and talk about accountability, ... Read more »

Take a Network Break! Lots of hardware news in today’s episode. We start with a new data center Ethernet switch from Dell designed to accelerate workloads on AI Ethernet fabrics. Public cloud networking startup Alkira raises $100 million in funding. Broadcom announces a 400G NIC that targets AI workloads, and Allegro Packets announces a 400G ... Read more »