The Everything Feed - All Packet Pushers Pods

Keith Parsons and Nick Turner discuss the latest WLAN Pi OS updates including the integration of model context protocol (MCP) for AI agent interaction. They also discuss Wi-Fi 7 multi-link operation (MLO) testing and simultaneous transmit and receive (STR) capabilities. Episode Links: WLAN Pi  

In this double-header episode, JJ and Drew talk with two cybersecurity experts. First up, Jayson E Street talks about how to make security awareness training effective and engaging. Instead of having employees sit through a video or lecture, or get scolded for failing a phishing test, Jayson’s approach, which he calls Silver Teaming, engages employees ... Read more »

Many a IT professional is having the AI football tossed to them, “We need to implement in house AI, go do it”. If this is you, what questions should you be asking of yourself and of leadership?   Getting traction accommodating vast new workloads with new and different behaviors is a challenge, given the parameters ... Read more »

Today on the Tech Bytes podcast, we learn about Meter Grants. This is a new program from networking vendor Meter that offers up to $2,000 in grants for early-career network engineers who are looking to get certified or advance their learning. We’ll talk about how the program works, who’s eligible to apply, and why Meter ... Read more »

Take a Network Break! Our Red Alert sounds for Nutanix Prism Gateway. Our news discussion covers a new pluggable optical form factor being pushed by Cisco and Nvidia, ORCA Computing launching a new quantum computer to run alongside GPUs, and New York University and New York City partnering to build a quantum fabrication facility in ... Read more »

In this sponsored episode Scott is joined by Stefano Gridelli, cofounder and CEO of NetBeez, to discuss continuous network experience assurance and moving beyond reactive troubleshooting. Together they break down how NetBeez uses user-perspective monitoring, distributed sensors, and AI-assisted data analysis to quickly isolate network performance issues. Stefano also highlights the next-generation...

In this sponsored episode, Alex La Fazia and Daniel Kaczmarczyk of Meter explain how they built an internal tool to automate network topology creation, drastically reducing design time from hundreds of hours to seconds. They share how they relied on a deterministic rules engine to ensure accurate, repeatable network configurations. They also discuss leveraging AI ... Read more »

IPv6-mostly is a foothold to get from your dual-stack network to a much more predominantly IPv6-run network, but the reality is that IPv6-mostly has a whole set of dependencies about the fact that IPv4 exists on the network. Ed, Nick and Tom discuss the realities of IPv6-mostly networks such as DHCP and SLAAC configurations, VPN ... Read more »

Ethan and Holly are back to walk us through Access Lists. Access Lists regularly appear in networking device configurations and aren’t just for security. Ethan and Holly break down what an access list is, how an access-list is processed, the various ways we might use an access list, and more. AdSpot Sponsor: Meter Most IT ... Read more »

John Capobianco returns to the show to discuss the latest developments in Model Context Protocol (MCP) and agentic infrastructure. John and host William Collins weigh in on the ongoing debate on AI consciousness, constitutional guardrails, and model welfare policies. They also look at emerging TypeSafe System One models and the practical realities of deploying autonomous ... Read more »

Eric Chou speaks with Leo Fleskes on the pressing infrastructure challenges surrounding AI resource consumption, including data centers’ massive water and power demands. Together they discuss local community pushback, regulatory constraints, and the economic viability of AI providers. AdSpot Sponsor: Meter Most IT teams are managing networks stitched together from years of acquisitions and v...

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 »