The Fat Pipe - Most Popular Packet Pushers Pods

On Heavy Networking today, AI operations for networking. That is, how do we delegate some amount of responsibility for network operations to artificial intelligence? Cisco is our sponsor, and our guests are Omar Sultan, Director for Product Management of Automation and AI; and Javier Antich, Chief Mad Scientist for AI (yes, that’s his title!). We talk ... Read more »

What’s the next era of network management and operations? Total Network Operations talks to Mahesh Jethanandani, Area Director(AD) for all of Operations and Management (OPS) at IETF and Distinguished Engineer at Arrcus. Mahesh describes a workshop from December of 2024 that sought to investigate the past, present, and future of network management and operations. He ... Read more »

We’re continuing our IPv6 Basics series discussing on this episode deployment.  We’ll help you sort out why you should deploy IPv6, things to consider before starting a deployment, and what approach you should take such as “inside out” vs. “outside in” and when you should deploy IPv6. Lastly we explain why you should seek out ... Read more »

We ask listeners for follow up and you’ve sent it in. On today’s show we respond to listener comments and corrections on tunneling, the link aggregation control protocol, link aggregation in general, and DHCP options. We also talk about the network engineering certification journey. If you’ve got a “Well, actually” or any other follow up, ... Read more »

On today’s show, we talk to Armon Dadgar, co-founder and CTO of HashiCorp regarding HashiCorp’s future within IBM. We start with a quick recap of IBM’s acquisition of HashiCorp and then move on to the challenges of bringing a small, young tech company into a huge corporation that makes lots of its revenue on legacy ... Read more »

Mobile devices blur the boundaries between personal and work devices and are packed with sensitive information, making them popular targets for malware, spyware, and data collection. On today’s Packet Protector we dig into strategies for managing threats to mobile devices with guest Akili Akridge. Akili started his career pulling burner phones off suspects as a ... Read more »

Orb is an intelligent app and platform designed to help consumers understand and improve their internet connectivity. Orb continuously monitors networks to give a complete picture of true internet experience, beyond just peak speed. Today’s guest, Doug Suttles, CEO and co-founder of Orb, explains exactly what Orb does, including speed, responsiveness and reliability testing, plus ... Read mo...

Take a Network Break! In our Red Alert section we note that memory safety bugs bug Firefox and Thunderbird, and on-prem SharePoint instances are under attack. In tech news, Fortinet adds support for Post Quantum Cryptography in FortiOS, Cato Networks integrates Azure Virtual WANs to its SASE offering, and we weigh the pros and cons ... Read more »

Adyen is a global payments processor whose primary business is providing payment services for merchants, retailers, and venues, as well as online payments. On today’s Heavy Networking we talk about a firewall automation project the company has undertaken. With dozens of change requests coming in every day that need to touch network and host firewalls, ... Read more »

Auvik is network management software that lets users monitor, manage, and troubleshoot their networks. On today’s sponsored episode we talk with Doug Murray, CEO; and John Harden, Director of Strategy & Technology Evangelism, both from Auvik, about the challenges facing today’s network operators. We look at the rise of the IT generalist, workloads and burnout, ... Read more »

Ethan and Holly continue their OSPF journey this week with OSPF Network Types. They discuss the two main OSPF network types used today: the broadcast and point to point networks. They also explain designated routers, backup designated routers, and when those are used and why. Lastly they discuss some soft skills – knowing your vendor ... Read more »

How is Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) evolving? How does user experience fit in? Today on The Cloud Gambit, Cory O’Daniel, Co-Founder & CEO of Massdriver, lends his experience as a coder, architect, and founder to help us answer these questions. Cory also discusses what it was like building and funding a startup in the 2021-2022 market, the ... Read more »

NautobotGPT is a new AI assistant for Nautobot that helps engineers with network automation, answers questions, recommends tooling, and delivers working code. We discuss the user experience of NautobotGPT with Matthew Schwen, Associate Director of Network Automation at Humana, CoFounder and CTO of PortalCX; and Brad Haas, VP of Professional Services at Network to Code. ... Read more »

CyberRatings, a non-profit that performs independent testing of security products and services, has released the results of comparative tests it conducted on Secure Service Edge, or SSE, services. Tested vendors include Cisco, Cloudflare, Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks, Skyhigh Security, Versa Networks, and Zscaler. We look at what was tested and how, highlight results, and discuss ... Read more &#1...

Whether it’s CNAME records pointing to dead endpoints or abandoned cloud storage buckets still mentioned in the makefile or Chef recipe, seemingly innocuous bits of infrastructure that don’t get cleaned up can turn into serious security threats. (Both of these examples are taken from real-life attacks, BTW). When and how and who within IT should ... Read more »

Take a Network Break! We begin with a listener question about a paper critiquing Shor’s Algorithm and quantum computing, and touch on a remote code execution vulnerability in Riverbed SteelCentral NetProfiler / NetExpress 10.8.7. We discuss a Cloudflare BGP misconfiguration that caused the Internet to hiccup, Broadcom’s new Tomahawk Ultra ASIC aimed for–you guessed it–AI .....

Today on the Tech Bytes podcast, sponsored by Palo Alto Networks, we examine how SASE is being adopted and deployed by enterprise customers. What does this integration of networking and security mean for the teams that need to operate this solution? We talk with Palo Alto Networks about SASE as a transformative technology for networking ... Read more »

Kevin Nanns is today’s guest on Total Network Operations. Kevin describes his “Wizard of Oz” moment when he discovered the world of networking. He talks about how he came up through the ranks working a help desk and then in a NOC, and his climb up the certification ladder. We also discuss how AI is ... Read more »

We have a network automation discussion for you today from sponsor Megaport. At the AutoCon3 conference earlier this year, Luke Gollan presented on a complex network automation project migrating Megaport’s API-driven software defined network from a legacy VXC overlay to an EVPN framework. This helped improve scalability, but was fraught with practical challenges, not the ... Read more »

Let’s talk about common misconceptions regarding DNS and IPv6. We’ve heard these often enough that we felt we should talk through each one. We cover issues including what kind of DNS record types can be returned via IPv6 (and IPv4, too), more details on what really goes on with Happy Eyeballs, and combining A/AAAA records ... Read more »

Our OSPF series continues with a look at OSPF neighbor formation and related timers. We talk about the five major packet types that carry information among OSPF routers, how OSPF routers become neighbors, how they negotiate link-state database exchanges, keep-alive messages, and how they negotiate designated and backup routers when multiple devices are on the ... Read more »

Curl is a widely used open source tool and library for transferring data. On today’s Day Two DevOps we talk with curl creator Daniel Stenberg. Daniel gives us a brief history of curl and where it’s used (practically everywhere). We also discuss the impact of AI on curl. Open source projects are often starved for ... Read more »

There’s lots of use cases for a portable edge devices that can provide compute and wireless connectivity: emergency response, a remote industrial site, an instant retail location, and so on. Heavy Wireless dives into HiveRadar’s instant edge in a box, which provides Intel NUCs, integrated switching, a wireless gateway, a PDU, support for G5 and ... Read more »

There’s lots of juicy stories in our monthly security news roundup. The Scattered Spider hacking group makes effective use of social engineering to target MSPs, Microsoft pushes for better Windows resiliency by rethinking kernel access policies for third-party endpoint security software, and the US Justice Department files indictments against alleged operators of laptop farms that ... Read m...

Take a Network Break! We start with listener follow-up on Arista market share in the enterprise, and then sound the alarm about a remote code execution vulnerability in Adobe Experience Manager. On the news front, Arista buys VeloCloud to charge into the SD-WAN market, CoreWeave acquires a cryptominer to get access to GPUs and electricity ... Read more »