The Fat Pipe - Most Popular Packet Pushers Pods

With the help of Josh Hardy, Co-Founder and CTO of Orb, we introduce Orb.  Orb is a suite app for OS, Android, macOS, Windows, Linux that is a new way to look at your internet connectivity.  Josh gives us a little background on why and how Orb was created,  He then goes into more detail ... Read more »

Just what’s inside that commercial software you bought? Does it contain open-source components, NPM packages, or other third-party code? How could you find out? The answer is a Software Bill of Materials, or SBOM, a machine-readable inventory of a finished piece of software. Why should you care about SBOMs? Our guest, Natalie Somersall, is here ... Read more »

Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG) initiatives aren’t just “the right thing to do”, they can also save companies real dollars, particularly if they’re investing in data centers and other infrastructure. Join Jonathan Ciccio, Continuous Improvement Manager for The Siemon Company, as we discuss The Siemon Company’s ESG initiatives. The Siemon Company has been in business for ... Read more...

Take a Network Break! Red Hat Samba server has a remote command execution vulnerability, and we cover some follow-up on fusion as a viable energy source (still a work in progress). On the news front, we search for signs in SoftBank’s sale of its Nividia stake, Mplify debuts a new certificate on carrier Ethernet for ... Read more »

If you’re building, testing, or using AI agents and services, how can you get network visibility into, and ensure performance of, these tools? On today’s Tech Bytes podcast, we talk with sponsor Cisco ThousandEyes  about how to monitor and measure performance of AI agents, AI models and services, and Model Context Protocol servers. We’ll get ... Read more »

NANOG, or the North American Network Operation Group, is an organization committed to the continuing advancement of an open, secure, and robust Internet. At the NANOG Conference 95 in late October 2025, Ethan Banks chatted with Steve Feldman, a member of NANOG’s Board of Directors. Steve has been involved with NANOG since the very first ... Read more »

Think you need a degree or a ton of certificates to succeed in tech? Think again. Matthew Oborne joins our hosts Alexis Bertholf and Kevin Nanns to discuss how he went from working fast food to leading operations at an ISP. Your starting point doesn’t define your ceiling; resilience, adaptability, and a willingness to learn ... Read more »

Today we delve into the tech expertise deficit and why technical depth and decades of doing the work matter more than social media followers and content creation hype. Our guest is Russ White, engineer, author, teacher, and certification developer. We begin with current events in AI, and then investigate the differences between career and influence ... Read more »

Tomas Kirnak, CEO of Unimus, joins Eric Chou in this sponsored episode to introduce Unimus, an on-premise network configuration management system built by network engineers to solve real-world problems. In this deep dive they discuss Unimus’ proprietary “Behavioral Tree” for automatic device discovery, the platform’s vendor support, the 70/30 rule, and lowering the barrier for ... Read more...

The evolution of the modern, Internet-driven economy has created the conditions for essentially unbounded Nth-party risks (that is, risks from your suppliers, and risks from your suppliers’ suppliers, and risks from your suppliers’ suppliers’ suppliers, ad infinitum). Nth party risks exist in public clouds, SaaS, software and hardware supply chains, and now in the form ... Read m...

Certificates are the socks of IT—everyone needs them, and you always lose track of a few. On today’s show we dive into the ACME protocol, an IETF standard to help automate how a domain owner gets a domain validation certificate from a Certificate Authority (CA). Our guest, Ed Harmoush, a former network engineer with AWS ... Read more »

Take a Network Break! We start with a critical vulnerability in Cisco’s Unified Contact Center Express. On the news front it’s a Cisco triple play: the company brings AI to professional services and tech support with Cisco IQ, debuts converged infrastructure for the AI edge, and launches a new cert geared for running AI data ... Read more »

How do you architect a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) to provide critical security services to millions of endpoints distributed across the planet? How do you build such a service for scale, performance, and resiliency? One option is to build your own PoPs or use colocation facilities, run your own infrastructure stack, and connect everything ... Read more »

What does network testing and validation really mean? How do testing and validation fit within an automation workflow? Is it possible to run meaningful tests without coding skills? Dan Wade from BlueAlly answers these questions and offers practical insights into building trust in automation through test environments, using AI for ideation and problem-solving, and personal ... Read more »

Today the IPv6 Buzz crew provides updates on the latest in IPv6 standards, RFCs, and best practices. They break down the recent discussions around RFC 6052, explore the options for RFC 8215, and share Nick’s spin on the now defunct testipv6.com site. Episode Links: RFC 6052 RFC 8215 RFC 6598 IPv6.army

MACsec is a protocol for encrypting Ethernet frames on a local (though not always local) network. Ethan Banks and Holly Metlitzky have an ELI5 (explain like I’m 5) discussion as to what exactly is MACsec and how it differs from IPsec. They talk about when and whether you need to implement MACsec with all the ... Read more »

If you think managing Kubernetes clusters is hard, what about managing Kubernetes clusters across three different public clouds? We dive into the challenges that arises from running multi-cloud Kubernetes workloads. These challenges include workload identity, DNS query resolutions, and security. Here to help us navigate this complexity and offer possible solutions is Goutam Tadi, Staff ... Read mo...

Did you know college students are snooping on satellite transmissions? On today’s news roundup we discuss new research in which university investigators use off-the-shelf equipment to intercept traffic from geostationary satellites and discover that a lot of it is unencrypted. We also dig into the credential hygiene lessons we can learn from a corpus of ... Read more »

Cisco Workflows is a new platform that makes network automation easier, smarter, and safer. On today’s episode, sponsored by Cisco, we get introduced to Cisco Workflows by Stephen Orr, Distinguished Solutions Engineer; and Reid Butler, Director of Product Management. They break down how Workflows helps you ditch repetitive tasks, roll out changes faster, and plug ... Read more »

nOversight is a Wi-Fi analysis app from Numerous Networks for iOS and Mac iOS that helps both end users and professionals do a better job of understanding how their Wi-Fi is running and how it’s working on their individual devices. Today we talk to Ben Toner, the creator of nOversight to give us the details ... Read more »

Take a Network Break! We start with some educational content on Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, and sound the alarm about a sandbox escape affecting the Firefox browser. On the news front, a DNS issue triggers a major Azure outage that affected numerous services and caused problems around the globe, Palo Alto Networks announces enhancements to ... Read more »

On today’s show, sponsored by Itential, we talk about automation in the real world. Guest Jesse Ford is an automation architect at Itential. We talk about his career journey, how he got into network automation, how he decides which is the best tool for a job, and why tool diversity isn’t the same as chaos. ... Read more »

On today’s episode, we take a break from one’s and zero’s for a discussion about starting a networking meetup. Our guest is Steinn “Steinzi” Örvar, who recently founded the ISNOG, a network operators’ group in Iceland. We quiz Steinzi about what worked and what didn’t. We also pick his brain for the nitty-gritty details about ... Read more »

Your background and experiences outside of tech can become a significant factor in your tech career. Guest Chris Williams is a good example; he talks about how his undergraduate and graduate studies in psychology influenced his work as a Developer Relations Manger at Hashicorp. Hosts Alexis Bertholf and Kevin Nanns chat with him about how ... Read more »

CVEs, or Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures, are such a routine aspect of tech that most IT pros probably take them for granted. But like many things we take for granted, the CVE process takes some serious organizational infrastructure to function. On today’s Packet Protector, sponsored by Cisco, we talk about the organizations and processes that ... Read more »