The Everything Feed - All Packet Pushers Pods

What are the best cybersecurity certs to get? Do advancements in cloud and AI mean security professionals need to re-skill? How do certifying organizations decide what new courses to create? Chief Curriculum Director and Faculty Lead at the SANS Institute, Rob Lee, joins Jennifer “JJ” Minella and Drew Conry-Murray to give an insider’s view on ... Read more »

Take a Network Break! This week we cover financial results from Palo Alto Networks (good, but next quarter’s softer forecast resulted in a drubbing), Cisco (not good), and Nvidia (so good that Wall Street is nervous about how long the party’s gonna last). Prosimo and Nokia have announced generative AI assistants that claim to help ... Read more »

One dark day, Ivan Pepelnjak stopped labbing. He just couldn’t make himself yet again go through assigning addresses, building links, putting devices in place, setting up OSPF, BGP, VXLAN, EVPN, etc. before even being able to start whatever simulation or test he wanted to do. But from that darkness arose netlab. Ivan created netlab to ... Read more »

It’s rare for strategists, executives, and technologists to all get on the same page in order to create, execute, and adjust an organization’s tech strategy, much less do it well. But it is possible. Johna and Greg discuss their experiences of seeing through some consultants’ smoke and mirrors, honestly evaluating an organization’s capability to implement ... Read more »

Are you on the IPv6 hit list? Does your CPE device have Recommended Simple Security Capabilities? Are your ULA prefixes unique, but still manageable? Do you have a protection method structure or are you just hoping that the IPv6 space is so vast the bad guys will never find you? Tom Coffeen and Scott Hogg ... Read more »

Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware has generated a lot of anxiety among VMware customers. In this episode, we closely analyze the situation. First, we look at Broadcom’s past acquisitions in the infrastructure sector. Then we examine the product alignment and possible new product offerings and whether the acquisition will hamper innovation and development. We also cover ... Read more »

Wi-Fi increases the GDP of entire countries, yet its tech community still has a grassroots feel. The COVID-19 work-from-home trend grew residential Wi-Fi like never before, yet it is still competing with 5G inside homes. Guest Claus Hetting, CEO of Wi-Fi NOW, joins host Keith Parsons to talk about the paradoxes, successes, and challenges in ... Read more »

Today we look at secrets management and privileged access management from the perspective of a network engineer. How do you and your team securely store sensitive data including passwords, SSH keys, API keys, and private certificate keys, while still being able to work nimbly? What Privileged Access Management (PAM) practices can help put guardrails in ... Read more »

The days of network cowboy heroism are over… or at least they need to be. It’s time for network engineering to grow up and standardize how networks are built. Not only will this make life easier for all of us as we inherit networks when we move from company to company, but it’s the only ... Read more »

What are we talking about when we are all talking about private clouds? On-prem? Hybrid? Virtualization? Where does hardware fit into it all– and would younger engineers even know what to do with a physical piece of hardware? Driven by Broadcom’s acquisition of VMare and the anticipated rising costs of VMare licenses, enterprises are exploring ... Read more »

Hi, I’m Eric Chou, and welcome to the Network Automation Nerds podcast, the newest addition to the Packet Pushers family. This is your audio destination for network engineers and infrastructure professionals who are on a mission to build stronger, more resilient systems through the art of network automation. Join us as we connect with a ... Read more »

It’s time to make the switch from WPA2 to WPA3. We cover how to do it and what migration challenges to be prepared for no matter what WLAN you are dealing with (open, passphrase, or 802.1x) . We also discuss what features make WPA3 an improvement over WPA2, particularly the replacement of PSK with SAE. ... Read more »

AI and automation are hot topics in telco, but not all projects are created equal in terms of the bottom-line value. We dive into how to calculate total value, and discuss why the area of assurance looks set to generate the most value. We provide key questions to ask when considering what AIOps to add ... Read more »

Hackers access a casino’s network through a fish tank thermometer. No, this isn’t Ocean’s Eleven, this is the reality of IoT/OT risks to enterprises today. Through its AI/ML-powered system, Palo Alto Networks takes a multi-pronged approach to these threats: Device identification, risk assessment, segmentation in zero trust policies, intrusion prevention, and automated security workflow. Kaly...

Take a Network Break! We start with an FU on return-to-office policies, and then dive into some announcements from Cisco Live in Amsterdam. Cisco is rolling out rack and blade servers with Nvidia Tensor chips, and Cisco is adding new features to its Digital Experience Monitoring capabilities. Verizon hopes to utilize its MPLS network as ... Read more »

Yale’s efforts to load-balance RADIUS servers is a case study in system design for resiliency. First, there was a lone, redundant PSN. Next, F5s load balancers entered the picture. Then the network team realized a feature in IOS-XE was the answer… and brought Cisco along the learning journey with them. Hear it all from the ... Read more »

A round-up of IP address news to start the new year: Eric Vyncke of the IETF has created an RFC 6724 website that is an excellent time-saving tool for figuring out source destination address selection processes. AWS announces more IPv6 features and support, and adds a new charge for public IPv4 use. State actors, including ... Read more »

Chaos engineering is all about resilience and reliability… it just takes the harder path to get there. By injecting random and unpredictable behavior to the point of failure, chaos engineers observe systems’ weak points, apply preventative maintenance, and develop a failover plan. Matt Schillerstrom from Harness introduces Ned and Ethan to this wild corner of ... Read more »

Welcome, trailblazers and visionaries! Today, I’m thrilled to unpack a treasure trove of wisdom that zooms into the exhilarating realm of strategy architecture and the craft of sculpting strategy roadmaps on a shoestring budget. The Thrill of Resourcefulness In this episode, my esteemed co-host Johna and I dove headfirst into a challenge that plagues countless ... Read more »

To understand the newest standard, Wi-Fi 7, it helps to look back at Wi-Fi 5 and 6, and even forward to Wi-Fi 8. What’s the reasoning behind the updates? How have they been experienced at the ground level? Who should make the change and when? Host Keith Parsons and Wi-Fi expert Srikanth Subramanian touch on ... Read more »

Wi-Fi 7 is the latest iteration of the wireless standard from the Wi-Fi Alliance. Wi-Fi 6 brought significant increases in throughput and performance. Wi-Fi 6e made the 6Ghz spectrum available (at least in the US). What does Wi-FI 7 bring to the table, and is it worth going through an upgrade? Our guest is Chris ... Read more »

This week on Network Break we discuss Dell terminating its resale agreement of VMware as Broadcom looks to streamline OEM agreements, a new Wi-Fi AP and cloud-managed switches from Extreme, and the fits and starts in US chip manufacturing. A new study finds Return-To-Office (RTO) mandates don’t improve productivity or company performance, but do drive ... Read more »

Guest Dinesh Dutt introduces his newest creation, SuzieQ. It’s a network observability platform application that has both a free, open source version and an enterprise version. Lightweight, fast, and platform-agnostic, SuzieQ’s use cases include network documentation, troubleshooting, fabric-wide visibility, network refresh and redesign, low/no code validation, audits and compliance, and proactive...

Hi, I’m Jennifer Minella and I’m excited to finally share with you all that I’ll be co-hosting a new podcast on the Packet Pushers network. It’s called Pocket Protector, a podcast exploring the intersection of networking and security. Each week, we’re drilling into topics, from wired and wireless network security to access control and zero ... Read more »

Cloud repatriation: Is it a good idea? Guest Marino Wijay, an OSI and networking open source advocate, joins hosts Ethan Banks and Ned Bellavance to discuss the recent interest in cloud repatriation. They cover the intricacies of moving workloads from the cloud back to on-premises or edge environments, and question if it is possible to ... Read more »