Packet Pushers - Full Podcast Feed

Is adding AI to your environment a software purchase? Or is it more like hiring an employee? Heavy Strategy’s John Burke and Johna Johnson debate whether AI should be treated as just another application you buy and use, or be handled like an employee you’re bringing on staff (complete with background and reference checks, training... Read more »

Take a Network Break! Guest opinionator Tom Hollingsworth joins Johna Johnson to opine on the latest tech news. On the vulnerability front, several versions of BentoML are open to a server side request forgery. Looking at tech news, Intel will spin out its networking and edge group as it continues cost-cutting, Palo Alto Networks makes... Read more »

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, Chair of NETCONF Working Group 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 talks about the IETF’s role in... 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 more »

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 »

Ayden 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 »

Laura Santamaria opens the listener mailbag to answer questions, including how to say yes or no to leadership opportunities without tanking your career or trashing your work-life balance. She also explores the mid-year review process and offers tips for successful self-evaluation and paths to self-growth. Episode Links: The Line Between Management and IC Leadership –... 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 »

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... Read more »

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 »