The Everything Feed - All Packet Pushers Pods

Take a Network Break! Johna fills in for Drew for a second week. We start with a follow-up on last week’s take on HPE and 5G. With this week’s HPE announcement that it’s launching Aruba Networking Enterprise Private 5G, we see that its offloading of OSS/BSS was to streamline, not a step away from its... Read more »

When a network for a new location needs to come online, networkers are faced with a predictable (and painful) to-do list: deal with ISPs, design and implement floor plans, obtain hardware, configure devices, etc. Meter’s Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) is here to take care of all that for you. Meter’s CEO Anil Varanasi joins the show to... Read more »

Greg Ferro, co-founder of Packet Pushers, is signing off. After years of frustrating health issues, he’s decided to fully step back from podcasting and industry analysis to take care of himself. After 14 years, today is his last appearance on Heavy Networking. In this parting episode, Greg shares his final dose of incisive insights and... Read more »

Welcome to a crossover episode with the Day Two Cloud podcast! Eric Chou was there for the birth of the public cloud. Before DevOps or SREs were a thing, before Azure was Azure, Eric was a network engineer for Amazon, helping them build out their retail technology platform. Of course, that platform evolved into the... Read more »

Eric Chou was there for the birth of the public cloud. Before DevOps or SREs were a thing, before Azure was Azure, Eric was a network engineer for Amazon, helping them build out their retail technology platform. Of course, that platform evolved into the world’s leading public cloud–AWS. Eric joins the show today to tell... Read more »

To be an effective technologist in a corporation, your efforts need to be aligned with the business strategy of your organization. In today’s episode, Johna and Greg show you how to do this, even if your organization has no written business strategy. They explain how to “read the tea leaves” to tell if your organization... Read more »

Matter is an IoT protocol that has security and interoperability baked into it. Steve Hanna, the chair of the Product Security Working Group in the Connectivity Standards Alliance, joins the show today to walk us through this IP-based protocol for smart home devices. He compares Matter to an armored car, delivering a valuable payload securely... Read more »

Take a Network Break! Johna fills in for Drew this week. We start with HPE adapting to the 5G market and unloading BSS/OSS tools to HCLTech. Dell financial results suggest AI problems. ISP Windstream replaces 600,000 routers destroyed by malware. France, Germany and the Netherlands lead the largest-ever police action against botnets with the help... Read more »

Today on Heavy Networking, sponsored by Broadcom, we talk about VMware’s transition under Broadcom’s ownership. The acquisition has led to big changes that rolled out very quickly, including how VMware sells products and services – subscription only licensing, bundles of products, a hard stop on sales of existing licenses, overhaul of license issuance, and more.... Read more »

Scott Robohn is responsible for so much of the current buzz and awareness of network automation. Today, we sit down with the co-founder of Network Automation Forum to learn about his own journey. We chat about his education and the question of if college degrees are necessary. We also talk about his experience at big... Read more »

If you’re an Active Directory administrator or part of an enterprise network team working with one, this episode is for you. Ed literally wrote the book “Practical IPv6 for Windows Administrators” so Scott has fun interviewing him as today’s guest. Ed goes over how to diagram out your IPv6 deployment, including address allocation and making... Read more »

Tabletop security exercises can help organizations game out their response to a security incident. From the technical and business considerations to legal and PR implications, a tabletop exercise, like Dungeons and Dragons, lets you play-test attack and defense scenarios. Johna Till Johnson, CEO of Nemertes consulting firm and co-host of the Heavy Strategy podcast, joins... Read more »

A cardboard box with a circuit printed on it that harvests just enough power to activate a radio and have it chirp something out a short distance: that’s just one of the cool products and 802.11 standards that stood out at this year’s Wi-Fi World Congress USA. Drew Lentz joins the show to recap the... Read more »

Welcome to a crossover episode with the Heavy Strategy podcast! Firing the wrong person, mistakenly rebooting core switches in a massive network, not passing the CCIE exam– today we talk all about failure. For this conversation, we’re joined by fellow Packet Pushers Kyler Middleton and Ned Bellavance, hosts of the Day Two Cloud podcast. We... Read more »

Firing the wrong person, mistakenly rebooting core switches in a massive network, not passing the CCIE exam– today we talk all about failure. For this conversation, we’re joined by fellow Packet Pushers Kyler Middleton and Ned Bellavance, hosts of the Day Two Cloud podcast. We swap stories, discuss response and prevention, and talk about accountability,... Read more »

Take a Network Break! Lots of hardware news in today’s episode. We start with a new data center Ethernet switch from Dell designed to accelerate workloads on AI Ethernet fabrics. Public cloud networking startup Alkira raises $100 million in funding. Broadcom announces a 400G NIC that targets AI workloads, and Allegro Packets announces a 400G... Read more »

The variety and number of OT devices continue to grow at such a pace that network engineers really need to think through how to manage them as part of their broader network. Dan Massameno joins the show to talk about how he’s collaborating with his facilities department and using SD-Access to manage the OT virtual... Read more »

There are about 1.4 million Kubernetes clusters just sitting out there on the public internet as we speak. That is 1.4 million lateral-movement rich, highly privileged environments. The bearer of this anxiety-provoking news is today’s guest, Lee Briggs. Lee explains why major cloud providers make this the default option– ease of use. The good news... Read more »

Zero trust is a buzzword, but what does it actually mean and how will it impact network engineers? Jennifer is here to get us up to speed. First, she gives a general description: It’s a security architectural strategy that’s progressing toward increased observability and trust inferences. Then she breaks it down for the three main... Read more »

Don’t call it remote work. Today Johna and Greg dive into distributed work– the future where there is no office vs. remote, there are just asynchronistic workers and their computer screens. Leaders have to move beyond “management by walking around” or “onboarding by shadowing.” They need to carefully select their ecosystem of tools (and tools... Read more »

Take a Network Break! This week we discuss what IBM and Palo Alto Networks get out of a deal for Palo Alto Networks to buy the SaaS version of the QRadar SIEM from IBM, why LogRhythm is merging with Exabeam, and how Google is positioning its latest AI chip to take on the Nvidia juggernaut.... Read more »

Welcome to the second part of our interview with friend of the podcast, Russ White. We start our conversation with a listener question about VXLAN/EVPN which acts as a springboard for what Russ really thinks about network engineering these days. He defends network snowflakes, championing their power in business use cases. He questions the merit... Read more »

Alexandra Huides didn’t like IPv6 on her first encounter with it. Today she is globally renowned for spreading the IPv6 gospel and helping AWS customers adopt it. Alexandra joins the show today to share what changed her mind about IPv6 and what she sees change the minds of network engineers every day: Greater client traffic... Read more »

Curious about what it takes to write a technical book as a network engineer? You’re in luck. The team behind Nautobot is also the team behind the book “Network Automation with Nautobot: Adopt a network source of truth and a data-driven approach to networking.” Jason, Ken, and John tell us about their writing process, timeline,... Read more »

Have you ever noticed “threat hunting” in vendor products and wondered exactly what it means? James Williams is here to explain: Threat hunting is the R&D of detection engineering. A threat hunter imagines what an attacker might try and, critically, how that behavior would show up in the logs of a particular environment. Then the... Read more »

Evaluating wireless use cases at a nuclear power plant is a little bit different than your average industrial job, starting with the stripdown to put on plant-provided clothing. Ferney Munoz joins us today to talk about his experience working as a wireless consultant at nuclear power plants. Obviously, radiation interference is a heightened issue, as... Read more »

Take a Network Break! We begin the episode with some follow-up on edge AI chips, whether Packet Pushers should start a dedicated AI channel, and a clarification on AWS and VMware. On the news front, we discuss the soft launches of AI assistant from Extreme Networks and Gluware, and a new virtual appliance for Cisco’s... Read more »

We turn the nerd meter up to eleven on today’s episode with longtime friend of the show, Russ White. First we dive into how an Ethernet adapter knows when a link is lost, where Russ teaches us all about loss of carrier and OAM. He also gives us a tutorial on how the rest of... Read more »

Keith Gregory teaches us about data engineering in a way DevOps folks (and hydrologists) can understand. He explains that the role of a data engineer is to create pipelines to transport data from metaphorical rivers and make it usable for data analysts. Keith walks us through the testing process; the difference between streaming pipelines and... Read more »

What’s the difference between cybersecurity “as a service” vs. “managed” vs. “hosted”? And what’s the difference between an MSP and an MSSP? In this episode, JJ helps untangle the terms and concepts in cybersecurity offerings. She explains what questions you should ask vendors to make sure you’re picking the right one for your needs; negotiating... Read more »

Why are some executives still insisting on Return to Office policies? Does it improve culture and productivity like they swear? Or is it more about the devaluing of a massive asset on their books: Commercial real estate. If the value of commercial real estate drops, companies have less to leverage for loans and– perhaps more... Read more »

Take a Network Break! This week we cover a new microsegmentation offering from Arista, new GenAI assistants from Fortinet, and a GenAI firewall from Versa Networks to monitor and report on how organizations are using generative AI tools and applications. AWS will stop selling VMware Cloud on AWS (but you can still get it through... Read more »

Network monitoring is growing increasingly complicated. Companies are facing more distributed applications and more remote employees. NetBeez, our sponsor today, is here to talk about how they monitor network performance in real time for the campus, WAN, and more. From proactively testing networks after configuration changes to identifying how well a worker’s laptop is connecting... Read more »

The future has arrived: 800 gig Ethernet is here. Amit Bhardwaj and Dmitry Shokarev from today’s sponsor, Juniper Networks, join the show to tell us all about Juniper’s 800 gig Ethernet and what we need to know as engineers: use cases, transition plans, fiber and power needs (a lot less than you’d think). We also... Read more »

As part of our ongoing series on IPv6 basics, today we cover the differences you should be aware of between ICMPv4 and ICMPv6. Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) is the protocol that lets you test reachability: Pings, echoes, TCP connections, etc. We explain what you need to know and why you need to know it,... Read more »

Today we chat with the maintainers of Nautobot, the open source network source of truth and network automation platform. Jason Edelman, Ken Celenza, John Anderson explain how their day jobs at professional services company, Network to Code, informs their work on Nautobot. They walk us through Nautobot’s core, out-of-the-box capabilities as well as the extensibility... Read more »

The classical encryption algorithms that currently undergird our IT infrastructure will be broken once there’s a powerful and stable enough quantum computer to do the job. Quantum-resistant algorithms are being developed by NIST, but implementation and deployment of these algorithms still have to be addressed. So what does all this mean for busy IT and... Read more »

With the rapid growth of IoT across enterprise and industrial spaces, now is a good time to check in on the wireless training and certification landscape beyond Wi-Fi. Today, Tom Carpenter, the Director of Education for the Certified Wireless Network Professionals joins us to give a lay of the land. He explains how the protocols... Read more »

Zero Trust Network Access, or ZTNA, is a core element of a Security Service Edge because it enables secure remote access to on-prem and cloud-based applications. On today’s episode, sponsored by HPE Aruba Networking, we dig into ZTNA from HPE’s perspective and hear customer stories on how it’s being used for third-party access, VPN consolidation,... Read more »

Take a Network Break! We welcome guest commentator Kyler Middleton of Day Two Cloud to discuss the IBM/HashiCorp deal, then pivot to new Wi-Fi 7 APs from HPE Aruba Networking, and discuss why a data center builder in Ireland is constructing a power generation plant alongside the generator–and powering it partly with vegetable oil. Noncompete... Read more »

What if instead of sending multiple queries out to APIs and getting disparate data back, you could just send a single query and receive a single answer. That’s exactly what GraphQL does for you. Rick Donato joins the show today to teach us about GraphQL and how it can help us on the path to... Read more »

The expectations for application delivery are higher than ever before, the networks that support those applications are increasingly distributed, and visibility is essential for network operations and troubleshooting. On today’s sponsored episode, Kentik’s Phil Gervasi joins us to discuss how Kentik collects essential performance data to help you monitor and manage all the networks your... Read more »

What makes for a good manager, director, and independent contributor (IC), and how do you figure out which is the best fit for you? Hazel Weakly has had a whirlwind tour of all three and is ready to share her insight into each. We talk about the skill set needed for each, and figuring out... Read more »

IoT devices are often like the tiny aliens in the locker in Men in Black: They’ve created a whole little world on your network without almost any humans knowing they exist. Today Troy Martin joins the show to teach us the basics of how to find and secure IoT devices on your network, specifically focusing... Read more »

Right now we’re in the first generation of edge architecture. We won’t even really know how to define it until we’re past it. Greg and Johna discuss the operational milieu in which the edge is forming: Vast numbers of IoT devices, increased remote computing capabilities, questions around cloud operational costs and efficiency, and vendors jostling... Read more »

Take a Network Break! This week we cover Hypershield, a new Cisco security product that uses technology from its Isovalent acquisition. We parse a blog from Broadcom CEO Hock Tan on the company’s VMware strategy, and discuss China’s latest counter-punch in its tech infrastructure fight with the United States. A KPMG survey reveals that executives... Read more »

Secure Access Service Edge, or SASE, combines SD-WAN with cloud-delivered security services including next-gen firewall, CASB, secure web gateway, and others. You can mix and match your SD-WAN and cloud security, but today Rajesh Kari from Palo Alto Networks is here to advocate for the benefits of their single-vendor option. We talk performance, security, and... Read more »

If you haven’t made the leap from traditional wide area networking to SD-WAN, or perhaps you’re thinking about adding security services to your SD-WAN infrastructure, this episode is for you. Rajesh Kari from Palo Alto Networks joins the show to share customer stories from the front lines of multi-branch businesses’ networks. Industry verticals including retail,... Read more »

When you chair the IPv6 Task Force for the United States Federal Government, you get a pretty good view of IPv6 implementation across the world and in every aspect of American society. That’s why we have Rob Sears on the show today. He gives us his perspective as chair of the task force charged with... Read more »

Welcome to a crossover episode with the Day Two Cloud podcast! AI has been around forever; AI is emergent. AI is just data analytics; AI hallucinates. AI doesn’t have many business use cases; AI is already being used by your employees. Today, Greg and Johna from the Heavy Strategy podcast join Day Two Cloud to... Read more »