Packet Pushers - Fat Pipe

Grab a virtual doughnut to blaze through this week’s IT news with Johna Johnson and John Burke as Drew Conry-Murray is enjoying his glazed, filled and sprinkled vacation donuts.  Today, we’re going to talk about getting good LLMs to do bad things, Dell’s workforce downsizing, Cloudflare’s recent outage, some developments in space networking, and more.... Read more »

There are both benefits and challenges when adopting automation in the public sector, but Red Hat Ansible enhances efficiency, security and service delivery. With the right tooling, network operators can integrate automation into existing environments and improve network security.  Providing insights into adopting automation in the public sector are Tony Dubiel, Principal Specialist Solution Architect... Read more »

IT and infosec professionals are used to operating and protecting mission-critical infrastructure; servers, databases, load balancers, and so on. But what about valves that control the flow of gas or oil in a refinery? Temperature and vibration sensors that monitor industrial manufacturing processes? If you’re thinking “That’s not my problem” think again. There’s a whole... Read more »

How do you lead with influence rather than mandate? On today’s show, we talk with JJ Asghar from IBM. JJ shares his extensive experience in managing open-source namespaces like GitHub and npm for IBM. He discusses the challenges of influencing decisions without formal authority and tailoring communication styles for different audiences. JJ also advocates for... Read more »

In today’s episode, we continue the discussion about routing and routing protocols by focusing on commonalities rather than differences among  protocols such as OSPF, RIP, EIGRP, or BGP. We explain how, in general, routing protocols discover each other, communicate, maintain relationships, and exchange routing information. Next, we explore the topics of selecting best paths in... Read more »

On today’s Network Automation Nerds, industry veteran Michael Bushong talks about lessons learned from failure. As the network industry grapples with automation and network engineers confront yet another cycle of upskilling and grinding out new certs, he warns against executives and practice leads aiming for the biggest, shiniest project. His advice? Find something that matters... Read more »

This week we dive into security headlines including a botnet bonanza that includes TP-Link routers, Chinese attackers targeting Juniper and Fortinet, and a case study of nation-state actors penetrating the operator of a small US electric utility. We also discuss ransomware attacks targeting critical infrastructure, a backdoor in an Android variant used in streaming devices,... Read more »

Take a Network Break! This week we cover Google’s $32 billion acquisition of CNAPP provider Wiz, Cloudflare offerings for AI security and support for post-quantum encryption, and NVIDIA’s pledge to open a quantum research center in Boston. NVIDIA has also announced new switch platforms with co-packaged optics for greater efficiency, Cisco shares details on its... Read more »

The Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) is an industry body that aims to optimize Ethernet for AI and HPC use cases. On today’s Heavy Networking we get an overview of the UEC and an update on its efforts. We’re joined by J Metz and Rip Sohan, both heavily involved with the UEC. We discuss the consortium’s... Read more »

What’s it like to move from a NOC role to an operations and automation role? On today’s show we get the perspective of guest Joseph Nicholson, a Network Operations Engineer at NTT Data.  He explains how he got started with automation, using tools like Python and Ansible, and the critical role of documentation in network... Read more »

Ready for more routing and routing protocols? Today we discuss the roles of the network operating system (NOS), routing protocols, the Routing Information Base (RIB), and the Forwarding Information Base (FIB). We also include the dynamics of routing protocols, the importance of hardware like TCAM for performance, and the concept of administrative distance or route... Read more »

The AI buildout is driving an infrastructure boom. On today’s show, we talk with Kendall Miller, an independent consultant in the DevOps and cloud-native space, about the boom’s potential impacts on DevOps. For instance, the rise of AI workloads will increase the amount of infrastructure to be supported. At the same time, AI tools are... Read more »

WireGuard and other overlay VPNs are the focus of today’s podcast with guest Tom Lawrence from Lawrence Systems. We dig into differences between WireGuard and traditional IPSec VPNs, how WireGuard’s opinionated approach to crypto suites helps improve its performance, and how WireGuard compares to OpenVPN. We also look at the broader category of overlay VPNs... Read more »

Take a Network Break! We start with warnings about an Apple Webkit zero day and ransonware exploits against known Fortinet vulnerabilites, and discuss attribution issues with the X DDoS attack. Intel names Lip-Bu Tan as Chief Resurrection Officer, but how long does he have before investors get antsy? HPE plans to lay off thousands of... Read more »

Mist AI is a key part of Juniper’s AI-Native Networking Platform to simplify operations and optimize user experiences across wired and wireless networks. On today’s sponsored show, we explore the evolution of network operations and talk about the integration of AI and automation in the Juniper Mist platform. We also look at how Juniper has... Read more »

Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) is all about understanding a user’s application experience, and pinpointing problems if the experience is bad. Under the DEM umbrella, you’ll find Internet Performance Monitoring, or IPM. That’s our topic in today’s episode with sponsor Catchpoint. With more and more applications hosted in the cloud and more employees working remotely, organizations... Read more »

On today’s N Is For Networking, we explore the fundamentals of routing, focusing on layer 3 of the OSI model. We explain the concepts of routers, routing tables, and routing protocols, and discuss why it’s important to have a firm grasp of these concepts before you tackle advanced topics such as VXLAN and EVPN. Today’s... Read more »

In this episode of the Network Automation Nerds podcast, we talk network management with Wim Gerrits and Pieter van Os, co-founders of Slurp’it and Netpicker. These tools aim to simplify network inventory and discovery, and ensure compliance and security. We talk about what drove them to build these tools, what problems they solve, and how... Read more »

On today’s Packet Protector episode we talk with sponsor Bowtie about its secure network access offering. If you think secure network access is just another way to say ‘VPN,’ you’ll want to think again. Bowtie’s approach aims to provide fast, resilient connectivity while also incorporating zero trust network access, a secure Web gateway, CASB, and... Read more »

Take a Network Break! This week we’re joined by guest analyst Tom Hollingsworth of The Futurum Group. We start with red alerts from Broadcom on multiple vulnerabilities and an emergency patch from Cisco for its Webex platform. In tech news we discuss SolarWinds’ acquisition of Squadcast and how it fits into the SolarWinds portfolio, Aviatrix’s... Read more »