The Everything Feed - All Packet Pushers Pods

This week's Network Break covers new HCI gear from the Cisco/Nutanix partnership, a sensor to detect Wi-Fi 6e performance, Intel financial engineering, Amazon shipping test satellites for a space broadband service, and more IT news.

Today's Heavy Networking is another roundtable episode. We've assembled a group of network engineers to talk about what's on their minds. Topics today include why other IT departments adn end users are quick to blame the network first, and what can be done about it; using Nokia's open-source Containerlab for testing and development work; and why you shouldn't feel left behind when you hear talk about 400G and 800G networks.

In this episode Tom and Scott explore Zero Trust Architecture (ZTA), where it aligns (and doesn't) with IPv6, and what the future might hold for both technologies.

Welcome to Day Two Cloud. If you want your journey to infrastructure automation to be successful, you have to prepare for that journey. On today's show we talk about how to lay the groundwork for infrastructure automation or Infrastructure as Code (IaC). And this isn't just about tools and training (though we do also discuss these). There are organizational, team, and personal elements required to help people to incorporate automation into their daily work.

LoRaWAN is a wireless protocol that's well suited for use cases that require long-range, low-power operations such as sensors, asset and livestock tracking, municipal "smart city" initiatives, and more. On today's Heavy Wireless, Keith Parsons welcomes Raymond Hendrix and Troy Martin to discuss the architecture of a LoRaWAN solution, its applications, and its pros and cons. They also share resources for further learning, including the Things Network and the LoRa Alliance.

Today on the Tech Bytes podcast, we talk with sponsor Palo Alto Networks about SD-WAN in healthcare markets. The healthcare sector has stringent requirements around the privacy and security of patient information, but clinics also need reliable and robust performance. We discuss how SD-WAN can help meet all these requirements.

Today's Network Break, with guest host Johna Till Johnson, discusses why Amazon is pouring $4 billion into a generative AI startup, Marvell's response to accusations of an NSA-friendly backdoor in older Cavium products, why Microsoft is investigating small modular nuclear reactors, Meta using public posts to train AI, and more tech news

Today’s Heavy Networking, sponsored by Palo Alto Networks, discusses Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) across the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE). You could think of ZTNA, as VPN evolved and SASE as SD-WAN evolved. Not only do you get an overlay connectivity fabric, but you also get cloud-hosted security services. We talk about how it all works together, the role of client software, Palo Alto Networks' architecture, integrating an IDP, and more.

Welcome to Day Two Cloud! Today we talk with sponsor Mirantis about Lens AppIQ. If you've started using Kuberentes and you've got multiple clusters supporting many applications, Lens AppIQ help you get visibility into what's going on. Lens AppIQ is a SaaS service that provides app-centric visibility, policy management, and governance. It's targeted at developers and DevOps teams.

Day Two Cloud continues the Cloud Essentials series with cloud storage. We focus specifically on AWS's offering, which include object, file, and block storage options. We also discuss special file systems, file caching, instance stores, and more. We cover use cases for the major storage options and their costs. We also touch briefly on storage services including data migration, hybrid cloud storage, and disaster recovery and backup.

Taking your feedback and followup and discussing the questions you bring us. Zero Trust Defintions, Out of Band in Zero Trust, Johna and/or Greg is/are insufferable and re-evaluating the Tech Job Debacle with hindsight.

On today’s Network Break, Greg Ferro is joined by guest co-host Brad Casemore. You can follow Brad on his blog Crepuscular Circus. Greg and Brad discuss new capabilities in Juniper’s Apstra data center automation software, Versa partnering with Intel to put security software on a NIC, and Cisco buying Splunk for $28 billion. The Linux... Read more »

Today's Heavy Networking covers Pandas. Not the cuddly bears that eat bamboo, but the Python library that makes it easy for you to work with a set of data. Import Pandas at the top of your Python script, follow one of many Pandas tutorials online, and in short order you’ll be able to perform data operations in a spreadsheet-like way. We talk network automation use cases for Pandas with Rick Donato.

Today's IPv6 Buzz episode dives into the topic of IPv6 address formatting, the do's and don'ts of representing an IPv6 address, and what guidance RFC 5952 provides for representing these very long addresses in text.

Today on Day Two Cloud we go deep on new areas of cloud security that you may not be familiar with. There are forces out there that are driving the rise of new security tools and processes, and we bring back guest Jo Peterson to help us make sense of it all.

The Wi-Fi Awards is an industry effort to recognize excellence and achievements in the wireless community. There are award categories for companies, products, and individuals. Award recipients are determined by a committee and by community votes. Today's Heavy Wireless explores the origins of the Wi-Fi Awards, discusses different award categories and the importance of recognizing individuals. We also discuss the nomination and selection process, and how listeners can nominate candidates.

Today on Network Break we get a plethora of networking news, including Cisco rolling out new custom Ethernet switch ASICs to compete for AI fabrics. Nokia announces new routers also boasting custom silicon, Intel makes noise about the Thunderbolt 5 connector, Marvell touts ASICs for automotive Ethernet, the AfriNIC registry goes into receivership, and more tech news.

Our topic today on Heavy Networking is SD-WAN monitoring at massive scale. Scale can grow quickly with SD-WAN when you account for the underlay, overlays, gateways, endpoints, and more. We talk with sponsor Broadcom about their monitoring platform and dig into a case study with a Broadcom customer providing global IT infrastructure for thousands of their own customers.

On today's Day Two Cloud we discuss the state of network automation and whether and how it can catch up to automation in the public cloud. We look at network automation challenges, define boundaries with other elements of the infrastructure stack, the impact of cloud networking, whether AI and ML can help, and more. Our guests are Chris Grundemann and Scott Robohn, co-founders of the Network Automation Forum (NAF).

On today's sponsored Heavy Networking we talk with Fortinet about how it converges network and security across the breadth of its portfolio. Fortinet is best known for its firewalls, but the company also offers campus and branch switches, has a wireless portfolio, offers SD-WAN and SASE, provides AI-supported operations, and more. We also talk about Fortinet's approach to the branch office that rethinks networking, security, and performance.

A special guest today, Keith Townsend joins Johna Greg to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing compared to on-premises infrastructure. We start by clarifying the definition of cloud and emphasizing the significance of software-defined infrastructure and automation in on-premises data centers. Keith shares his perspective on hybrid infrastructure and making the case for a combination of on-premises and off-premises resources as the future of enterprise IT.

This week on Network Break we dig into Microsoft's post-mortem of an attack that led to the theft of emails from multiple US government agencies, discuss Huawei rolling out a new 7nm chip despite US trade restrictions meant to thwart advanced chipmaking, examine a Cisco and Nutanix team-up, and more tech news.

Virtual Application Networks, or VANs, are today’s Heavy Networking topic. Our guest is Ted Ross, motive force behind the Skupper.io project. Skupper builds VANs in Kubernetes clusters that are conceptually like a VLAN or VPN, except that all the magic happens at layer 7. Skupper is based on the Advanced Message Queueing Protocol (AMQP), making it effectively a message bus used to interconnect application messages inside of mTLS tunnels running on top of whatever L3 network is available. If you're confused, don't be. We talk it all out, and explain why it's relevant to today's networking pros.

In today's IPv6 Buzz podcast, Ed, Scott, and Tom bring Nick Buraglio back on to the show to discuss IPv6 Unique Local Addressing and the latest activity at the IETF to attempt to address both protocol and operational challenges associated with RFC 6724.

Today's Day Two Cloud kicks off an occasional series on cloud essentials. For the first episode we discuss the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC). A VPC is an fundamental construct of a public cloud. It's essentially your slice of the shared cloud infrastructure, and you can launch and run other elements within a VPC to support your workload. Ned Bellavance walks through key VPC components including regions and AZs, networking and IP addressing, paid add-ons, data egress and associated charges, monitoring and troubleshooting, and basic security controls.

Drones can be a useful tool for outdoor wireless surveys. Drones can help an engineer figure out the best place to mount a radio, get line of sight between points, confirm antenna orientation, and save a lot of climbing up and down ladders. On today's Heavy Wireless, Keith Parsons speaks with Mike Wade, a wireless design engineer who uses drones in his survey work, about the certifications and requirements necessary to add a drone to your toolkit.

Today on the Tech Bytes podcast we discuss the Network Automation Forum (NAF) and its inaugural independent conference--AutoCon 0. The networking industry has been taking about automation forever, but most engineers and organizations don't get much beyond a few scripts. The Network Automation Forum wants to change that by serving as a salon where enterprises, service providers, and vendors can talk openly about what works, what doesn't, and how to advance the state of the art.

Today on Network Break we discuss Juniper integrating ChatGPT with its AI digital assistant, Microsoft's plan to unbundle Teams in the EU to fend off regulators, financial results from soon-to-be-paired Broadcom and VMware, a 5G follow-up, and more.

In today's sponsored Heavy Networking we explore new features in Cisco Thousand Eyes, an operational tool based on visibility and observability of public and private network. Thousand Eyes has continued to grow into complex operational areas such AWS Network Path, Webex performance, and integrations with Meraki to help you identify and fix network and application performance problems.

Today on Day Two Cloud we dive into the implications of licensing changes that HashiCorp has made to its popular Terraform software. In short, the company has switched from an open source to a business source license. HashiCorp says it felt compelled to make the change to ensure that some other business entity doesn't take the open-source software and turn it into a competing product (looking at you, AWS). Will the licensing change have a significant impact? For 99% of users probably not, but there are caveats and concerns to discuss. Today's show is a crossover with Chaos Lever, a weekly podcast co-hosted by Ned Bellavance and Chris Hayner that covers IT news.

Are you interested in learning more about aligning technology choices with organizational goals? Our podcast has got you covered! Listen now to explore the importance of technology alignment with business objectives.

Today on the Tech Bytes podcast we talk about monitoring network and application performance. Our sponsor is Catchpoint, and they’ve sent a customer, StackPath, to talk about using Catchpoint in production. This includes real-time BGP monitoring and Catchpoint’s observability network that lets you test networks and applications from multiple vantage points, and instant tests when you need immediate data.

Take a Network Break! On today's episode we discuss two announcements from VMware Explore 2023: a private AI offering, and a revamped NSX for public and private cloud networking. We also discuss recent rule changes at the SEC that require public companies to disclose material security incidents in a timely manner, NVIDIA's huge revenue results, SUSE going private, and more tech news.

EVPN/VXLAN is our topic on today's Heavy Networking. What is it? What’s it for? Should you deploy it? Since you’ve probably already got a network, how do you add EVPN to it? Do you need special hardware? How does EVPN impact your security design? And what are the fundamentals? Our guest with the answers is IT instructor Tony Bourke.

In this episode, Ed, Scott, and Tom discuss IPv6 multicast, what it is, how it differs (and doesn't) from its IPv4 counterpart, and how it's used in production.

In this podcast episode, Keith Parsons, Glenn Kate, and Lee Badman discuss the intersection of ham radio and Wi-Fi. Glenn and Lee share their personal experiences and involvement in both fields. They talk about how they got started in ham radio and Wi-Fi, the importance of joining amateur radio clubs, and the various activities and... Read more »

We’ve got more durm and strang in open source license debate, cars that don't work wihtout a network, something mumble something Fibrechannel, a security acquisition by Check Point, cheesy microchips and more.

On today's Heavy Networking we explore network and firewall automation with sponsor BackBox. BackBox has developed a platform that aims to deliver practical automation out of the box. We get under the hood to understand how it works, what it delivers, and how it addresses the challenges of network and security operations.

On today's Day Two Cloud we examine the similarities and differences among SSE and SASE, which provide cloud-delivered security; and SD-WAN, which can provide connections to these services. We also discuss the drivers for cloud-delivered security, the role of networking, where and how zero trust can come into play, some of the big players in these spaces, and more.

Today on Network Break we discuss big moves in open source, including HashiCorp switching from an open source license to "business source" and Red Hat competitors banding together to offer an alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). We also discuss Google's odd attempt to get employees back to the office by charging them to stay at an on-campus hotel.

This week on Heavy Networking we've assembled a roundtable of network engineers to talk about...stuff. Each guest has brought a topic to discuss with the table, so we've got lots of subjects and lots of experiences and opinions. In particular we explore SPB, career advice, getting network automation off the ground, and the joys and perils of self-hosting.

In this episode, Ed, Scott, and Tom get technical with a discussion of IPv6 Router Advertisements (RAs), what they are, what they're for, what information they contain, new and future RA options, and what you need to know about them to help deploy IPv6 effectively.

Red teams attack a customer's security systems. The idea of a red team, whether consultants or in-house, is to approach the target like an attacker would. A red team includes technical and human-based exploit and attempts to test defenses, probe for weaknesses, and identify vulnerable systems and processes. On today's episode we look at how to get the most out of a red team engagement--it's much more than just an attack and a report.

3D printing is a popular activity among wireless network engineers. Given that they deal with invisible, intangible radio waves all day, maybe it's no surprise they'd enjoy making things they can touch and feel. On today's Heavy Wireless we talk about why the wireless community enjoys 3D printing, and how engineers can make and use printed objects on the job--and at home.

Today on the Tech Bytes podcast we get into Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM). DEM goes beyond traditional SLAs by offering more precise measurements of network and application performance as experienced by end users, and can provide detailed measurements to help network engineers identify and respond to problems. We talk with sponsor Fortinet about how it delivers DEM.

Take a Network Break! This week we discuss new charges for IPv4 addresses being levied by AWS, Cisco's acquisition of a BGP monitoring service, and financial results for a host of tech companies. We also speak with J Metz, the Steering Committee Chair of the Ultra Ethernet Consortium to learn more about the organization's goals; and examine the efforts to investigate claims of a breakthrough in superconducting research.

On today's sponsored Heavy Networking we dig into cloud-delivered Secure Web Gateways (SWGs), which help guard end users against Web-based threats and enforce corporate Web access policies. As employees split time between home, office, and who knows where else, and as more applications move online, cloud-based SWGs help connect and protect workers. Our sponsor is Palo Alto Networks.

Today's Day Two Cloud peers inside the box of quantum computing. We explore how it works, what qbits are and why they matter, the current state of quantum computing hardware, what problems could be solved with quantum computing, and how you can get involved with it via the Qiskit open-source project. Our guest is Abby Mitchell, Quantum Developer Advocate at IBM.

The use of physical infrastructure has changed substantially in the last three years. Data centres are scaling down, offices and branches are being re-considered. One view is that offices are ‘playgrounds’ where white collar workers gather to chat, socialise, drink free coffee and have face-to-face for one or two days a week. An opposing view is that its legacy way of working but it will take time for people to adapt to remote work.

Today on the Tech Bytes podcast we explore Secure Web Gateways with sponsor Palo Alto Networks. Secure Web Gateways sit between users and Web traffic to enforce policies around Web and application access and inspect traffic for malware. We talk with Palo Alto Networks about customer challenges with secure Web gateways, innovations in Prisma Access Cloud Secure Web Gateways, and more.