The Everything Feed - All Packet Pushers Pods

In this sponsored episode by Cisco we explore how agentic AI is transforming network operations and what it means for your career. Robert Barton, an AI Distinguished Engineer at Cisco Systems, joins Ethan and Holly to help us snap the artificial intelligence puzzle piece into your networking picture. Together they break down the AI trifecta: ... Read more »

The Pope issued a recent encyclical on AI, urging developers to safeguard human agency in the age of artificial intelligence. Eyvonne and William explore this encyclical, moving beyond the headlines to the core message regarding human dignity. They examine how the document provides a values-based framework for evaluating technology and the need for a balanced ... Read more »

Early in 2026, Drew Conry-Murray authored the first Packet Pushers Salary Survey, offering a transparent look into compensation in the network engineering industry. Drew joins Eric to discuss the results of the survey, the challenges of interpreting global data, how to use this data to advocate for your market value, and more! AdSpot Sponsor: Meter ... Read more »

VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) and Desktop as a Service (DaaS) have been arriving “real soon now” for the past couple of decades. Will the advent of vendors’ AI spyware (as Google is introducing through Chrome) be the accelerant that finally makes it happen? John and Johna discuss why the challenges in this brave new AI-enabled ... Read more »

MACsec (IEEE 802.1AE) encrypts Ethernet frames hop-by-hop at Layer 2 — before traffic even hits IP — making it one of the strongest protections you can put on wire. It’s been in the standards for years, hardware support is widespread, and yet most organizations aren’t running it. JJ and Drew dig into why: the hardware ... Read more »

Take a Network Break! Our Red Alert covers critical vulnerabilities in Ivanti Sentry, including OS command injection and authentication bypass, for which patches are now available. On the news front, we dig into Arista’s new 1.6Tbps rack-scale portfolio for AI infrastructure and Nokia’s Deepfield Genome Shield, designed to proactively stop DDoS from residential proxy botnets. We ... Read more &#18...

Your network is an interconnected system. A change you make on one device has consequences beyond that device. Therefore, to do your job well, you must think about the network as a whole. That’s the big idea behind a blog post written by guest Jason Gintert. He joins Ethan and Drew to talk about how ... Read more »

You can learn a lot about IPv6 from books, videos, and podcasts (such as this one), but it’s hard to beat hands-on experience. John Osmon joins our hosts to discuss how to set up your own IPv6 environment. They cover what John has done, including low-cost home lab options, how it’s impacted his thinking, and ... Read more »

As a network engineer, you’ll end up with a lot of weird problems to solve. Many times, the problems will not be with the network at all, and it’ll be up to you to figure it all out. But how? Ethan and Holly discuss techniques for effective troubleshooting. Those techniques include how to gather accurate ... Read more »

As AI matures, it becomes increasingly important to know how it’s performing and what it actually costs. Ned and Kyler are joined by Anuj Tyagi, Senior Site Reliability Engineer for RingCentral, to discuss the critical shift toward AI observability. AI observability is not just about costs; Anuj breaks down why observability has to include agent ... Read more »

The Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) is a postmortem of a year’s worth of cyber incidents and breaches, and a snapshot of how well organizations are responding to actual threats. Drew and JJ share highlights from the 2026 installment, including: For the first time, vulnerability exploits top the list for initial access What a ... Read more »

The upper 6 gigahertz band is fracturing among national lines after a verdict from regulatory bodies in the UK and the EU. While the US enjoys full Wi-Fi access along the entire 1200 megahertz, the EU has decided to reserve most of the upper band for mobile services, and the UK is testing a split ... Read more »

Take a Network Break! Our Red Alert covers a critical Android vulnerability that could lead to local privilege escalation to root. On the news front, we dig into Cloud Control, Cisco’s ambitious AI ops platform that spans its networking, security, compute, observability, and collaboration portfolios. We also talk about Cisco Live Protect, which provides pre-patch ... Read more »

If you think Tailscale is just a VPN for the home lab, think again. On today’s sponsored episode Ethan and Drew are joined by Tailscale CEO Avery Pennarun. Avery explains how the company has evolved into an enterprise-grade connectivity and security platform. He also dives into Tailscale Aperture, their new AI gateway designed to bring ... Read more »

Scott is joined by Brett Lykins, a Senior Systems Development Engineer at Amazon. Brett works with software-defined infrastructure built around SONiC (Software for Open Networking in the Cloud). Together they dig into what it’s actually like to use, maintain, and operate a network this way. They also discuss not just the architecture, but the day-to-day ... Read more »

Today’s guest takes us behind the scenes of modern concert venues, which rely on wired and wireless IP networking. Michael Keith Lewis is a front-of-house engineer, tour manager, audio creator, and co-founder of Truck Packer. Michael shares his career path from starting in a church, quitting a salaried job to tour with his favorite band, ... Read more »

Sif Baksh joins Eric Chou to share his professional experience and resources to help engineers get their arms around using AI in network automation. They discuss practical advantages of AI over standard Python scripts and the risks and benefits of vibe coding for prototyping. Sif also breaks down the P.E.N.E. framework, a structure for writing ... Read more »

William and Eyvonne discuss recent tech news, including the growing political and community opposition to AI data centers driven by fears over power and water usage. They also analyze the “AI Chip War” as hyperscalers such as AWS and Google invest in specialized silicon for training and inference.  Episode Links: Amid backlash, O’Leary Digital CEO ... Read more »

Starting an investigation—be it for troubleshooting, problem diagnosis, threat hunting, incident response, and so on—is fairly straightforward. There’s a question or thesis you’re pursuing, you have logs and data sources to check, and you have tools to deploy. But if you don’t find anything, does that mean there was nothing to find? Are you sure ... Read more »

By now most organizations have AI strategies (among their other tech strategies). But how do you know when it’s time to make a midcourse correction? Better still: How can you predict when, and what kind of corrections you might need? John and Johna discuss, and tell the story of how a university prepared for technology ... Read more »

Take a Network Break! We start with listener followup and a red alert affecting  ScadaBR, an open source SCADA controller. On the news front, Forward adds predictive testing to its network digital twin software, Qumulo and Cisco team up to offer cloud-bursting for file storage, and NetBrain adds new skills and other updates to its ... Read more »

Drew and Ethan sit down with Tony Bourke to determine whether TradCore or EVPN VXLAN is right for your network. Tony is a seasoned instructor in automation, network design, and more. They explore the key factors for choosing a design, including scale and redundancy, operational complexity, and workload mobility. AdSpot Sponsor: Auvik Sponsor Auvik Network ... Read more »

Today’s conversation centers around a new Best Current Practices (BCP) RFC draft written by Jordi Palet Martinez. Our hosts explore the document for service providers and enterprises, including prefix sizing for point-to-point links, the pros and cons of numbering choices, and best practices for prefix pool allocation. Episode Links: IPv6 Prefix Assignment to End-Sites – ... Read more »

In the previous episode of N is for Networking, Jennifer “JJ” Jabbusch gave us a thorough overview of Network Access Control (NAC) for wired networks. This week we’re going wireless! JJ walks us through the major differences between wired and wireless NAC, how 802.1X is more seamless in Wi-Fi deployments, the unpredictability of web portals, ... Read more »

Hosts Ned and Kyler compare notes on everything they’ve been doing with AI, including the successes they’ve enjoyed and headaches they’ve suffered building and implementing AI agents. They talk about how AI has sped up their workflows, how managing multiple AI agents is akin to raising toddlers, the necessity of using deterministic scripts for increased ... Read more »