Heavy Networking

Today's Heavy Networking explores the challenges Wireless ISPs (WISPs) face when bringing services to locations without a lot of fiber in the ground. Those challenges include lining up radio antennas, maintaining mountaintop gear, wild horses, network and routing designs, and more. Our guest is Bradley Thompson, Senior Network Engineer at SkyFiber Internet.

On today's Heavy Networking we dive into the frameworks commonly used by service providers to tackle network slicing and traffic engineering challenges. We'll also talk their pros and cons, and the approach that Cisco is seeing its customers adopt as providers create virtual networking products for their customers. Cisco is our sponsor for today's show.

You ever want a group of fellow networking nerds to hang with once in a while? The US Networking User Association might be exactly what you’re looking for. With local networking user groups popping up in various places all over the US and soon other countries, the USNUA is fostering community and knowledge sharing for networkers everywhere. On today's Heavy Networking we speak with Jason Gintert and Chris Kane, two of the folks behind the USNUA organization, to discuss what the USNUA is, and how you can work with them to get a NUG started in your area.

Fortinet is a security vendor most of you have heard of. But if all you think of when you hear the name “Fortinet” is firewalls, well yeah, but you should think more broadly. On today's sponsored Heavy Networking we're going after the work-from-anywhere challenge with Fortinet’s Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) tech, all of which is baked into FortiOS. If you’re running a FortiGate, you’ve got these capabilities already.

Today’s Heavy Networking podcast explores the concept of NetDevOps with sponsor Itential. The idea behind NetDevOps is to advance your network to the point where it’s self-service; that is, the network you operate can be consumed the way public cloud services are consumed. Our guest is Itential co-founder & CTO Chris Wade.

On today’s Heavy Networking we get into IPv6 essentials for network engineers, including how to incorporate IPv6 support in upcoming projects, how IPv6 affects NAT and subnetting, what the heck Happy Eyeballs and nibble boundaries are, and why you should approach IPv6 with a mindset of abundance not scarcity.

You know all those Apple and other IoT devices connected to your wireless network? Lots of them run apps that discover services on your network via multicast DNS (mDNS). All of that mDNS traffic can have a significant impact on your WLAN’s performance. On today's Heavy Networking we talk with guest Bryan Ward who has actually measured the impact of mDNS on a production wireless network to see what would happen if he let mDNS traffic run wild.

Lots of folks suffer from impostor syndrome. Tech is complex--how could you know what you’re doing? And yet, many of us are responsible for incredibly complex IT systems. Fake it ‘til you make it, right? To handle the cognitive dissonance of impostor syndrome, we overcompensate. In doing so, we pay a personal price. Today's Heavy Networking guest is Matt Vitale. He's here to share what he's learned about coping with and overcoming imposter syndrome.

On today's Heavy Networking we sub in a podcast from our Heavy Strategy channel. Greg Ferro from the Packet Pushers and Johna Till Johnson, CEO of Nemertes Research, discuss the impacts of ChatGPT and AI on the technology workspace, including whether human workers can partner with these tools to increase productivity and improve technology experiences. They don't have answers, but they do have unanswered questions.

On today’s Heavy Networking I talk with two people who have built and are running Hachyderm, a Mastodon instance which orients itself towards technical-minded folks. What started as a cool project in the basement suddenly grew to tens of thousands of users. I talk with Hachyderm's founders on how they scaled, problems they encountered, how they solved problems, and how they grappled with technical and human challenges.

On today's Heavy Networking, sponsor Graphaint is here to discuss how it's rethinking SD-WAN using a Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) model to help customers consume WAN connectivity instead of setting up and operating a WAN for themselves. Graphiant combines SD-WAN mainstays such as multiple connection options and traffic policies based on applications and performance, without the operational overhead of SD-WAN tunnels. We dive into the how and why in this episode.

On Heavy Networking today we look at a home lab running VMware products including NSX, as well as infrastructure-as-code products Terraform, Packer, and Ansible. These use cases create a different hardware demand than virtualized network operating system images. Guest Maarten Van Driessen explains it all, including how he saves money on lab gear.

In today’s Heavy Networking show with sponsor Broadcom we go deep into network management and Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM). At its heart, DEM is about understanding the user experience of the network. Network monitoring and management products that incorporate user experience, such as Broadcom's DX NetOps, can provide visibility into network and application performance to help inform troubleshooting efforts and speed resolution.

Welcome to Heavy Networking! In this episode we discuss LibreQoS, a free and open source software project to help ISPs improve network latency and responsiveness and improve the Quality of Experience (QoE) for their customers. That project is LibreQoS, and it's being used by ISPs and others to ensure stable latency across networks.

The Packet Pushers' Heavy Networking podcast dives into sponsor Augtera and how its AI platform, purpose-built for networking, improves network operations and enables automation. We'll examine how Augtera works, how it aims to move beyond the automation of configurations to automate operations and fault management, the kinds of data it collects and how, and how customers are using Augtera in production networks

Today's Heavy Networking is a forward-looking episode about semantic networking. Semantic networking aims to make decisions on how to route packets based on more than just the destination address and give network operators more routing choices based on considerations such as bandwidth, cost, performance, application type, and so on. But how do you add semantic information to IP headers? How do you program routers and networking hardware to consume semantics? Do we really need this? Guests Adrian Farrel and Hannes Gredler join Greg Ferro and Ethan Banks to discuss and debate.

Would you give an artificial intelligence responsibility to write your router configurations? You wouldn’t. Not yet. But we’re not as far from that as you might think. On today's Heavy Networking we dig into OpenAI and ChatGPT and what it might mean for networking.

On today's Heavy Networking, guest Tom Costello walks us through his personal lab in the cloud. We discuss pros and cons of the cloud vs. a basement, using EVE-NG vs. CML, how automation can help you manage cloud costs, resources for those who might want a cloud lab, and more.

Today on Heavy Networking, home labs. Specifically, we’re going to discuss building and using a lab with virtualized Juniper gear in EVE-NG. Our guest is Christian Scholz, who has written and presented quite a bit on this topic.

On today’s Heavy Networking we get inside the process of technical writing and product documentation from a person deep in the trenches of creating docs. We also talk about why writing as a skill might be worth cultivating even if you aren’t responsible for creating the manual.

On today's Heavy Networking podcast, sponsored by Juniper Networks, we discuss how metro networks are evolving to Cloud Metro, how to apply cloud principles and automation to these locations, and how the attack surface changes when you transition to Cloud Metro. We also talk about how Juniper supports active assurance and zero trust security in these environments.

Today on Heavy Networking, modeling your network with Batfish. Batfish is an open-source project that builds a model of your production network based on a snapshot of your network and device configurations. Engineers can then test and validate changes against this model before making those changes to the production network. Guest Rick Donato walks us through how Batfish works, use cases, and more.

Today on Heavy Networking, a discussion with sponsor VMware about SD-WAN and SASE. We’re diving into announcements from VMware Explore Barcelona 2022 covering a new SD-WAN client and more. With this client, you’ll be able to connect your users to the SASE cloud with software--no hardware edge box required. We dive into how it works, the network architecture, use cases, and more.

On today's Heavy Networking we look at the idea of embedding zero trust into applications. The way we do cyber security these days has failed in significant ways. What if we could extend the AAA or RBAC model to all applications? Better yet, what if we take the RBAC model, make authentication more robust than username & password, assess endpoint security posture constantly, and evaluate each request individually up at layer 7 for all applications? Guest Galeal Zino has opinions on what embedded zero trust looks like. We discuss.

Heavy Networking welcomes sponsor Netris to the show with a special episode for you network nerds who are really getting into automation, infrastructure as code, pipelines, and so on. Netris is all about bringing that public cloud VPC experience to the network you’ve already got. Imagine being able to consume your existing network with APIs and being able to stand up VLANs, VXLANs, elastic load balancers, firewalls, Internet gateways, and more the same way you do in the cloud, but on premises.

Today on Heavy Networking we have a round-table discussion about Data Processing Units (DPUs). These devices let you bring networking, security, and storage capabilities closer to server workloads without burdening server CPUs. Guests Pete Lumbis and Aaron Glenn help us dissect DPUs, identify use cases, discuss adoption and operational challenges, and more.

Today’s Heavy Networking, sponsored by Nokia, dives into Nokia's fabric-based approach to data center automation and operations. That approach includes its SR Linux network OS, its Fabric Services System intent-based platform, its NetOps Development Kit, or NDK, and how all this ties together to address your operational life cycle across Day zero, Day 1, Day Two, and beyond.

On today’s Heavy Networking episode, I talk with Nick Carter about Flock Networks, his routing protocol stack startup, as well as Nick’s love of the Rust programming language. As a network engineer, maybe you don’t think you care about Rust. Nick’s here to explain why the discerning network engineer might prefer their routing daemons to have been written in Rust. We also talk about the pleasures and travails of startup life.

As carriers and service providers look to embrace disaggregated infrastructure and software, and drive new business through technologies such as network slicing, it’s critical to have management and orchestration capabilities to coordinate hardware and software resources in the RAN, the transport layer, and the network core. On today's sponsored Heavy Networking, sponsored by Juniper, we dive into Juniper's Service Management and Orchestration (SMO) platform, which is designed to provision, manage and monetize custom network services on demand.

On today’s Heavy Networking podcast, Kevin Myers joins us for a whitebox conversation. Kevin helps Internet Service Providers build their networks, and has noticed increased adoption of whitebox switches. Why? Are the problems whitebox solves for these ISPs the same you might have at your company? Should you consider whitebox instead of Cisco, Juniper, or Arista? Maybe…and maybe not.

On today’s sponsored Heavy Networking we dive into new features of Cisco’s Network Services Orchestrator, or NSO. NSO is a network orchestration platform for large enterprises and service providers that offers multi-vendor automation, configuration management, service creation, ongoing monitoring and upgrades, and more.

Encrypted traffic poses a problem for enterprise policy enforcement. On today's Heavy Networking, we explore the notion of zero knowledge middleboxes, which use a variety of techniques to allow firewalls or other middleboxes to enforce policy without the need for decryption. Our guest is Dr. Paul Grubbs, whose research into zero knowledge middleboxes prompted this episode.

A full zero trust architecture goes up and down the stack, bringing in policy and enforcement strategies from the application layer, all the way down into the network. On today's Heavy Networking podcast we discuss zero trust network access, or ZTNA, with sponsor Fortinet. ZTNA is but one part of a robust zero trust architecture, but what a crucial component it is. Alex Samonte, Director of Technical Architecture, joins us to get into nerdy specifics about Fortinet’s ZTNA.

Today on Heavy Networking, aerospace networking. We talk with Lexie Cooper, who works for Blue Origin as an Avionics Integration Engineer. That’s right. Lexie does networking for rockets. We talk about the challenges of building networks for spacefaring vehicles, differences between aerospace and the typical enterprise, continuous learning, the pros and cons of building a social media presence, and more.

On today’s episode of Heavy Networking, we discuss secure wireless planning and design with Jennifer "JJ Minella. JJ is the author of the book "Wireless Security Architecture." We talk about the goals for planning a wireless design, why it's worth the upfront investment, keeping operators in mind as you design your deployment, the importance of communication, design iteration, and more.

Today's Heavy Networking podcast explores what it's like to set up a temporary network to support thousands of users at a live event. We discuss planning and preparation, defining requirements, design options, performance and security issues, and what to keep in your bag for that last-minute emergency. Our guests are Jim Troutman, Jason Davis, and Alex Latzko.

What does privacy have to do with running a network? Is protecting the privacy of users, customers, and the organization one of the responsibilities of the networking team? If so, what kind of information has to be kept private and how? Should privacy efforts focus on compliance, or on risk reduction? How are those different? On today’s Heavy Networking podcast we welcome Russ White to tackle these perplexing privacy questions.

Single pair Ethernet. That’s right. Ethernet over a single twisted pair, rather than the four you’re used to. Or two if you’ve got a little gray in your beard. Now, single pair Ethernet isn’t fast in the way we network engineers would normally think of fast. SPE runs at 10 megabits per second. But in the use cases SPE was designed for, 10Mbps is very fast indeed. To tell us all about single pair Ethernet is Peter Jones. Although Peter wears many hats in the networking industry, today he comes to the microphone as the chairperson of the Ethernet Alliance.

Today on Heavy Networking, we discuss NVMe over fabric, where your Ethernet and IP network is the fabric. Many NVMe over fabric discussions focus on what’s happening inside the storage packets themselves. This conversation focuses on the network. What does the topology need to be? What are the latency and loss characteristics of an NVMe transport fabric? What QoS tools should you be considering, how do they work, and when should you use them? Our guest for this vendor-neutral conversation is J Metz.

What’s been your experience with architecture vs. engineering roles? Are those distinct functions or combined in your organization? How do the roles interact? Does the architecture team hand down holy designs from their ivory tower the engineering team is expected to implement them? Is the architecture and engineering function more combined, where experienced engineers are expected to create an architecture and help put it in place? Ethan Banks and guest Pat Allen share their experiences with architecture and engineering roles from organizations they've worked in.

In today’s sponsored Heavy Networking podcast we dive into Juniper Cloud Metro, which includes new appliances, software, and integrations with other Juniper services to address the entire business of ownership and operations. Our guests are Kanika Atri, Sr. Director, Product Management; and Tim Pennell, Sr. Director, Product Management.

DNS is our subject on today's Heavy Networking. More specifically, DNS transport over TCP. We talk with John Kristoff, one of the forces behind RFC9210, which covers the operational requirements for DNS transport over TCP. This is not an esoteric document covering a tiny, nuanced DNS use case. Instead this doc will likely affect most of you listening, whether you’re a network operator or a name server operator. We talk with John about the implications of this RFC.

Heavy Strategy is a new podcast from Packet Pushers. We look at the strategy and business of IT Infrastrucrure in two-sided debate format. We believe that the questions are more important than the answers since its all your responsibility anyway.

On today's Heavy Networking podcast we talk with sponsor Arelion about how it continues to build and maintain global IP networks, and why you should be considering them for your backhaul needs.

Today on Heavy Networking we’re talking about mindfulness in the workplace. Mindfulness, which is about being aware of your senses and feelings in the moment, could be a useful tool to help you navigate the high-stress, high-stakes IT profession. Our guest is Jennifer “JJ” Minella. She’s an IT practitioner, network architect, author, and the founder and principal advisor of Viszen Security.

In today’s sponsored Heavy Networking we talk to Juniper Apstra about how how Apstra delivers on unified data center operations, why fabrics are everywhere, how Apstra differs from other automation and intent solutions, and more. Our guest is Mansour Karam, VP of Product Management.

Today's Heavy Networking gets into networking hardware from MikroTik, a vendor you may not have heard of. Our guest is Kevin Myers, a senior network architect and consultant who uses MikroTik with a variety of clients big and small. We'll find out what MikroTik is good for, and not good for, management and support, and more. This is a non-sponsored episode.

In today's Heavy Networking podcast, sponsored by NVIDIA, we explore DOCA on Bluefield DPUs. DOCA is a runtime operating system on the DPU including tools for provisioning, deploying, and orchestrating containerized services. It's also an SDK to supports a range of operating systems and distributions and includes drivers, libraries, and tools. Our guests are Justin Betz and Wes Kennedy, both Technical Marketing Engineers with NVIDIA.

Today's Heavy Networking dives into the automation and orchestration of 5G networks with sponsor Juniper Networks. We discuss Juniper's RAN Intelligent Controller (RIC), Service Management and Orchestration (SMO), how Juniper works with the Open RAN ecosystem, and more. Our guest is Constantine Polychronopoulos, Vice President of 5G and Telco Cloud at Juniper Networks.

On today's Heavy Networking we talk about why it's important to say "No" when someone tries to put more work on you than you can handle. Guest Tom Hollingsworth wrote a controversial blog post entitled “No Is A Complete Sentence” about how to say "No," to even when it's hard to do. We talk about the nuances of this stance, the risks you take when you do, time management, balancing workloads, and more.