The Everything Feed - All Packet Pushers Pods

On this week's Network Break podcast we examine Palo Alto Networks adding AI Ops to its SASE offering, and Microsoft Copilot bringing AI into its suite of Office tools. The Ethernet Adapter market grew 22% in 2022, but not because more NICs were sold; we discuss the real reasons and cover more tech news.

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.

Today's Day Two Cloud episode gets into sales engineering. IT pros may look down on sales for not being a strictly technical discipline, but it turns out there's more overlap between an engineer and a sales engineer than you might think. Both have to solve problems, understand requirements, and design and deliver outcomes. Our guest is Pete Robertson, a sales engineer for a value-added reseller.

Today's Tech Bytes podcast gets into network automation with sponsor BackBox. BackBox’s approach to automation is to focus on network engineers and integrate automation with how they already do their jobs. BackBox works with more than 180 network and security vendors.

Take a Network Break! On today's episode we discuss a record quarter for switch sales, examine Germany's mixed signals about allowing Huawei gear in its networks, and debate whether employees' frustration over Google's desk-sharing plan is just entitled whining or a legitimate complaint. Plus more IT news.

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.

Today's IPv6 Buzz podcast explore the topic of default address selection with IPv6 hosts as defined in RFC 6724. It's very common for a host to have multiple IPv6 addresses of different types (as well as an IPv4 address in dual-stack environments) and RFC 6724 includes rules for which addresses are used first.

Today on Day Two Cloud we engage in strategic thinking about cloud, workload repatriation, costs and spending, DevOps and Kubernetes, and more with guest Tim Banks. Tim is a Lead Developer Advocate at Dell Technologies and has done stints at AWS, Equinix, and the Duckbill Group. Besides being a techie, Tim Banks is also a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu champion and world-ranked competitor in his class.

Short answer is yes. Long answer is long. CHatGPT is useful for demonstrating potential and getting more funding for AI. In terms of potential for real work, well, its not good enough.

Take a Network Break! We begin with some FU on what constitutes on-prem and off-prem, and then dive into news. Cisco and T-Mobile are partnering on 5G gateways, Cisco Webex is getting installed as a feature(?) in Mercedes E-Class cars, and Cisco is buying multi-cloud security startup Valtix. Valtix offers firewalling, IPS, a cloud Web... Read more »

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.

Today on Day Two Cloud we put on our thinking caps about platforms, cloud, and multicloud. The last ten years or so has been a push for "cloud-first," but any wholesale approach to "X-first" (cloud, edge, digital, etc.) is problematic. We discuss why. We also explore strategies for CTOs, IT managers, and engineers on how to grapple with cloud strategy, implementation, and operation.

We talk a lot about automation and orchestration and how they can change your network strategy and smooth network workflows. But not everybody wants to sit around writing code and building test labs. Greg and Johna talk with Josh Stephens and Chanoch Marmorstein from sponsor BackBox about its network automation software, how it fits into a network operations strategy, and how BackBox focuses on the network engineer.

Today on the Tech Bytes podcast we’re talking about OpenTelemetry with sponsor Cisco ThousandEyes. OpenTelemetry is an open collection of tools, APIs, and SDKs to help share telemetry data among different monitoring and analysis platforms to improve data correlation and visibility. ThousandEyes, the first network visibility platform to support OpenTelemetry, joins the podcast to discuss how it works, use cases, and more.

Is the private 5G market big enough to justify HPE's acquisition of Athonet? Is saving money worth retreating from public cloud? Why are organizations still getting bit by basic cloud misconfigurations? Will an appetite for AI deliver results for Nvidia? We explore these and other questions in the latest Network Break podcast.

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.

Today's podcast episode revisits the subject of IPv6 address allocation along with how changes in network planning and Regional Internet Registry (RIR) policy are influencing allocation size requests. We also look at how network trends around IoT, cloud, and SD-WAN might affect allocation size and how to overcome "IPv4 thinking."

WebAssembly (Wasm) is an up-and-coming technology that's probably going to fall into the lap of operations folks. WebAssembly is basically a specification on how to compile things to a bytecode format and how to execute that bytecode. On today's Day Two Cloud we start to peel the onion on what WebAssembly, what it's used for, and why you might want to get your hands on it.

Today's Tech Bytes podcast dives into the notion of applying Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) to users on campus as well as remote workers. Our sponsor is Fortinet and we discuss bringing ZTNA to users on prem, as well as IoT devices.

This week's Network Break looks at who takes a haircut in Avaya's Chapter 11 restructuring, GoDaddy's ongoing security issues, new photonics from Nokia, a huge quarter for Arista and more tech news.

It might be curmudgeon day. Johna and Greg ask what are mistakes that we have seen in technology strategies.

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.

Today's Day Two Cloud assembles a panel to discuss the challenges of multicloud networking. We're sponsored by Prosimo, and the recording took place live at AWS re:Invent 2022. We discuss how and why an org goes multicloud, cloud networking issues, integrating ZTNA, and more.

Today on the Tech Bytes podcast we talk about Event Handler, a new automation feature in Nokia’s SR Linux network OS that lets you automatically run scripts to fix problems when an event occurs. Nokia is our sponsor, and our guest is Roman Dodin, Product Line Manager at Nokia.

Take a Network Break! On this week's episode we discuss new chip hardware from Fortinet, Extreme integrating its SD-WAN into its network fabric, the US and UK governments sanctioning members of the Trickbot malware gang, more tech layoffs, why tech CEOs should feel more financial pain, and more.

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

In today's IPv6 Buzz podcast we discuss IPv6 Neighbor Discovery and some of the operational issues that can happen when configuring and operating IPv6, and what can help listeners understand and resolve those issues.

On today's Day Two Cloud podcast we talk about Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and software practices you might want to put in place for the parts of your team who know what they're doing with infrastructure but may not be familiar with developer practices that can help make code more reliable and operational processes more repeatable. Our guest is author Rosemary Wang.

On this week's Network Break we examine Ericsson's push for 5G network slicing on laptops, Microsoft injecting ChatGPT into Teams to do the grunt work, financial results from Juniper and Amazon, and more tech news.

Today on the Tech Bytes podcast we’re talking about cloud migration and operating in a multi-cloud environment. We’re sponsored by VMware and we’re speaking with Expedient, a VMware partner. Expedient is also a cloud service provider and runs 14 data centers across the US. Our guest is Bryan Smith, CEO at Expedient.

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.

On today's Day Two Cloud podcast, we speak with Jan Hofmeyr, a VP within Amazon Web Services (AWS). This show was recorded at AWS re:Invent 2022 in Las Vegas, and we discuss EC2 at the edge, AWS Outposts and how local zones work, connecting Outposts to the AWS cloud, and more.

On today's Tech Bytes podcast we discuss security reconnaissance with sponsor Fortinet. We drill into FortiRecon, a service that can provide critical information, personalized for your organization, about potential threats to company assets, employees, and customers.

Take a Network Break! This week we discuss new capabilities in Juniper's Astra data center automation software; a major Microsoft outage that affected Outlook, Teams, and more; reports that Intel will discontinue selling the Tofino programmable ASIC; a heap of financial results; and more.

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.

In today's IPv6 Buzz podcast, Ed, Scott, and Tom speak with Jad El Cham about the RIPE NCC IPv6 training program as well as RIPE NCC's role as the European and Middle Eastern Regional Internet Registry providing Internet resources including IPv6 addresses.

After setting questions and perspectives on What is Enterprise Architecture, the natural sequence is How to Maintain and Operate an Architecture team.

On today's Day Two Cloud podcast we talk about Compute Express Link (CXL), a technology for composable infrastructure. The idea is to take all the peripherals in a system---network cards, memory, graphical processing units, and so on---and put them on a bus outside the chassis to share them among multiple hosts. Is this the dream of composable infrastructure coming true?

On today's Network Break podcast we cover a raft of Juniper vulnerabilities, whether Cisco should patch serious vulnerabilities in end-of-life products, a big T-Mobile breach, Avaya dealing with significant debt, sweeping rounds of layoffs, and more IT news.

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.

On today's sponsored Day Two Cloud podcast we talk about zero standing privilege with strongDM. Zero standing privilege goes beyond just-in-time credentials to a model where no credentials pre-exist, but are created in real-time and paired with appropriate permissions built from policy, also created in real-time. Can such a thing be accomplished technically---and without irritating all your end users? StrongDM's Sebastian Mankowski is here to make the case.

Take a Network Break! This week's episode covers a bunch of tech news including Arista rolling out a heap of new switches, Intel pinning its comeback hopes on newly released Xeon CPUs, a serious exploit of a Fortinet SSL VPN vulnerability, Dell pulling away from China-made chips, 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.

The IPv6 Buzz podcast talks with Richard Hicks about Microsoft's OS changes and use cases for IPv6. Richard is a technology consultant and author. We discuss which Microsoft solutions use IPv6, what its v6 strategy changed, and more.

IT security is broken. Vendors ship insecure products, customers have to bolt on and then operate more and more security products, compliance and regulatory requirements don't necessarily make things safer, and getting business done always takes priority over securing systems and data. On today's Day Two Cloud podcast, guest Mick Douglas shares ideas on how to make security less excruciating and more effective.

Take a Network Break! For our first show of 2023 we skip the news to spend some time speculating on technologies and trends that may influence IT and networking in the coming year, including the influence of AI, machine learning, and ChatGPT in tech; data center network automation; cloud repatriation; and more.

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.

In today's IPv6 Buzz episode, Ed, Scott, and Tom talk about the good, bad, and ugly of vendor support for IPv6-only. While some vendors support dual-stack deployments, things get a little more precarious when you want to turn off IPv4 entirely.

Today on Day Two Cloud we examine global network performance of some of the biggest public cloud providers. Sponsor ThousandEyes shares key findings and surprising data points from its 2022 Cloud Performance Report on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

Take a Network Break! On today's episode we cover a new certification roadmap from Cisco, speculate on the future of corporate office space, and delve into an FTC lawsuit that aims to stop Microsoft's $69 billion purchase of game developer Activision. We also cover Broadcom financial results and space networking stories from Apple and SpaceX.