The Fat Pipe - Most Popular Packet Pushers Pods

Kevin Nanns is today’s guest on Total Network Operations. Kevin describes his “Wizard of Oz” moment when he discovered the world of networking. He talks about how he came up through the ranks working a help desk and then in a NOC, and his climb up the certification ladder. We also discuss how AI is... Read more »

We have a network automation discussion for you today from sponsor Megaport. At the AutoCon3 conference earlier this year, Luke Gollan presented on a complex network automation project migrating Megaport’s API-driven software defined network from a legacy VXC overlay to an EVPN framework. This helped improve scalability, but was fraught with practical challenges, not the... Read more »

Our OSPF series continues with a look at OSPF neighbor formation and related timers. We talk about the five major packet types that carry information among OSPF routers, how OSPF routers become neighbors, how they negotiate link-state database exchanges, keep-alive messages, and how they negotiate designated and backup routers when multiple devices are on the... Read more »

Curl is a widely used open source tool and library for transferring data. On today’s Day Two DevOps we talk with curl creator Daniel Stenberg. Daniel gives us a brief history of curl and where it’s used (practically everywhere). We also discuss the impact of AI on curl. Open source projects are often starved for... Read more »

There’s lots of juicy stories in our monthly security news roundup. The Scattered Spider hacking group makes effective use of social engineering to target MSPs, Microsoft pushes for better Windows resiliency by rethinking kernel access policies for third-party endpoint security software, and the US Justice Department files indictments against alleged operators of laptop farms that... Read more »

Take a Network Break! We start with listener follow-up on Arista market share in the enterprise, and then sound the alarm about a remote code execution vulnerability in Adobe Experience Manager. On the news front, Arista buys VeloCloud to charge into the SD-WAN market, CoreWeave acquires a cryptominer to get access to GPUs and electricity... Read more »

Cisco recently announced a major evolution to its certification roadmap: starting February 2026, the popular DevNet certifications will transition to a brand-new Automation track. Joining us today is Francois Caen, Product Manager at Cisco, also an expert in network automation and a recognized voice in the Cisco Learning and Certification Community. We talk with Francois... Read more »

Quantum computing is here, and it’s being used for more than cracking encryption. On today’s Packet Protector we get a primer on quantum, how it differs from classical computing, its applications for difficult computing problems, why quantum will be the death of blockchain, and how to think about quantum risks. Our guest, Johna Johnson, is... Read more »

Take a Network Break! HPE and Juniper have settled with the US Department of Justice, allowing HPE’s $14 billion purchase to move forward. However, as part of the deal, Juniper must grant a full license to its AI Ops for Mist source code to one, or perhaps two, companies via an auction to be overseen... Read more »

SNMP is still widely used in today’s networks. But modern telemetry and network observability are bringing changes to network monitoring. Today’s Heavy Networking is a roundtable discussion about alternatives to SNMP and real-world use cases for those alternatives. This episode was inspired by a request from listener Nikolay. He says… While telemetry (gRPC, etc.) is... Read more »

On today’s show we talk about NetDevOps and AI Ops with Greg Freeman, VP of Network and Customer Transformation at Lumen. Greg spearheads network automation, orchestration ,and AI strategy, guiding the highest technical tier in operations and championing NetDevOps methodologies. We talk about the people and work culture that’s influenced the development of automation and... Read more »

By popular request (and now that we have some other background topics covered) we start our series on the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) routing protocol. We kick off the series with OSPF basics including Link State Advertisements, Link State Database, and other related essentials. We’ll explore additional OSPF topics over subsequent episodes. This week’s... Read more »

MCP, or Model Context Protocol, is an open-source project originally created by Anthropic. MCP is designed to let AI agents to connect to data repositories, applications, business and developer tools, and other agents to execute tasks and carry out instructions. Day Two DevOps explores the capabilities and pitfalls of MCP, how the protocol works, and... Read more »

Take a Network Break! Our Red Alert is a remote code execution vulnerability in Roundcube. On the news front, HPE announces GreenLake Intelligence, which will bring agentic AI capabilities to the HPE portfolio, Pure Storage brings cloud-like operations for on-prem storage, and Juniper Networks adds predictive analytics to its data center ops platform. Weka rolls... Read more »

Today’s Packet Protector digs into risks and threats you might encounter in a Kubernetes environment, what to do about them, and why sometimes a paved path (or boring technology) is the smartest option. My guest is Natalie Somersall, Principal Solutions Engineer for the Public Sector at Chainguard. We talk about risks including identity and access... Read more »

Service provider networks face a couple of difficult challenges: how to map service level agreements to actual network health and performance, and how to deliver service assurance to customers regardless of what happens on the network. On today’s sponsored Heavy Networking we talk with Cisco Systems about its approach to service assurance, how Cisco is... Read more »

At AutoCon 3 in Prague, Scott Robohn sat down with Ernest Lefner from sponsor Gluware to talk about lessons learned throughout his career: from his early days of pulling cable to becoming Chief Product Officer at Gluware and helping to found ONUG. Ernest talks about being a continuous technology learner, and also about the need... Read more »

People consistently overestimate their ability to predict whether a new product or feature will be a success. Instead of blithely going forward with a project that takes up lots of resources and yields minimal results, today’s guest says we should get our ideas into contact with external reality as quickly as possible, and maybe do... Read more »

If you need to route in your network, you can program static routes into all your routing-capable devices. And this can work. But at some point, you’re probably going to want to switch to a dynamic routing protocol. On today’s N Is For Networking, Ethan and Holly discuss the differences between static and dynamic routes,... Read more »

On today’s show, we’re joined NetBox Labs co-founders Mark Coleman and Kris Beevers. They recount how they founded NetBox Labs and discuss its growth and how it’s being used. We also delve into the NetBox Labs community and its importance for users. And of course, there’s the ever-present AI discussion. Mark and Kris also talk... Read more »

Secrets trickle out through misconfigurations, poor tooling, and rushed Git commits. Today’s guest, John Howard, joins us on Packet Protector to walk through practical secrets management with Vault and TruffleHog to help make sure you don’t expose your privates. John discusses work he’s done to build an automated process in his organization for developers and... Read more »

Take a Network Break! Our Red Alert for the week is a remote code execution vulnerability in open-source XDR platform Wazuh. In tech news, we dig into several announcements from Cisco Live US including: unified management of Meraki and Catalyst gear, new switches, an AI Assistant for the Meraki dashboard, a Deep Network Model LLM,... Read more »

There’s an old saying that a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. On today’s show, we talk about taking your first step into network automation with guest Joseph Nicholson. He’s been automating at NTT Data for many years now and has some perspective to share. He’s a network engineer by trade,... Read more »

Today we chat with Megaport’s Mitchell Warden, Founding Engineer; and Alexis Bertholf, Global Technical Evangelist, to find out what NetOps is like at Megaport, a company that provides scalable internet connections for all types of organizations. We look at the origins of Megaport and how the company started with the intention of network automation from... Read more »

What shape is your network? In other words, what is its topology? On today’s episode, we discover the different types of network topologies and designs used in the enterprise, data center, and service provider networks. We cover leaf/spine, hub and spoke, point to point, mesh, and others. We also talk about how topologies affect traffic... Read more »

Is WebAssembly the next big thing? Here to help us understand what WebAssembly (WASM) is and what it can and can’t do is Michael Levan, a consultant and WASM trainer. He also dives deeper into WASM details such as hosting, security, monitoring, and the ever-present influence of AI. AdSpot: Spacelift Founded by the creator of... Read more »

Our security news roundup discusses the compromise of thousands of ASUS routers and the need to perform a full factory reset to remove the malware, why Microsoft allows users to log into Windows via RDP using revoked passwords, and the ongoing risk to US infrastructure from “unexplained communications equipment” being found in Chinese-made electrical equipment... Read more »

Take a Network Break! We start with two critical vulnerabilities: one affecting cloud versions of Cisco ISE, and the other for HPE StoreOnce. In the news, Broadcom announces the Tomahawk 6 ASIC with 102.4Tbits of bandwidth, SentinelOne suffers a self-imposed network outage, and the Wireshark Foundation announces its first-ever professional certification for Wireshark. Cisco rebrands... Read more »

Network automation is today’s topic with sponsor Gluware. Gluware provides a network automation platform that targets both network engineers and automation builders. On today’s Heavy Networking, we discuss how Gluware supports these two constituencies. We also talk about a recent product announcement, Gluware Labs. Gluware Labs includes a free Community Edition of Gluware software you... Read more »

“Reinvent or die” is an apt adage for the ever-churning technology industry. Brad Maltz joins us to share his insights on what he calls “continuous reinvention” and how that relates to his own career and why others might want to adopt this mindset. Brad is a Senior Director of AI Solutions at Dell and has... Read more »

Let’s explore four goals of network design: stability, speed, scalability, and security. These goals are based on Ethan’s experience designing, building, and operating networks. Network architects and design experts might have other objectives, and that’s fine, but these four goals are the basis of today’s episode. Ethan and Holly discuss why these four goals are... Read more »

Firefly is a cloud infrastructure automation platform that helps cloud teams, DevOps, SRE, platform engineering, DevSecOps, and other groups manage their entire cloud as code. Firefly helps to manage cloud complexity and produce consistent and efficient cloud platforms with code. To help Firefly better understand their customers and industry trends around Infrastructure as Code (IaC),... Read more »

“There must be a better way!” is guest Bart Dorlandt’s motto, which he applies to network automation, among other things. In today’s episode, Bart shares what he’s learned about network automation, explains why he focuses on process over tools, and reflects on the importance of mentorship. Bart and Eric also discuss why even if listeners... Read more »

Microsegmentation divides a network into boundaries or segments to provide fine-grained access control to resources within those segments. On today’s Packet Protector we talk about network and security reasons for employing microsegmentation, different methods (agents, overlays, network controls, and so on), how microsegmentation fits into a zero trust strategy, and the product landscape. Episode Links:... Read more »

Take a Network Break! We start with a Red Alert for the IBM Tivoli Monitoring Tool, which has an unpatched (as of recording time) vulnerability that could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code. On the news front, Salesforce ponies up $8 billion for Informatica to improve data governance capabilities, Google researchers revise estimates of... Read more »

If you participate in the public Internet by announcing your own netblocks, you should be familiar with Internet Routing Registries (IRRs) and the Routing Policy Specification Language (RPSL). These are tools that help you be a good network citizen. In a world of BGP hijacks and other problems, these tools matter more than ever. We... Read more »

Total Networks Operations sits down with Justin Ryburn for a wide-ranging discussion on the state of the networking industry. Topics including how to attract new talent to network engineering and network operations; getting literate in DevOps/infrastructure tools such as GitHub, Terraform, and Python; pairing Dev and NetOps to maximize domain expertise; integrating tools and trying... Read more »

We wanted to do an episode on SD-WAN, but realized we needed to set the stage for how wide-area networking developed. That’s why today’s episode is a history lesson of the Wide Area Network (WAN). We talk about how WANs emerged, public and private WANs, how WANs connect to LANs and data centers, the care... Read more »

Cloud networks aren’t like traditional data center networks, so applying a traditional network design to the cloud probably isn’t the best idea. On today’s Day Two Cloud, guest Aidan Finn guides us through significant differences between Microsoft Azure networking and on-prem data center networks. For instance, subnets don’t segment hosts, network security groups do; every... Read more »

Aviatrix is a cloud network security company that helps you secure connectivity to and among public and private clouds. On today’s Packet Protector, sponsored by Aviatrix, we get details on how Aviatrix works, and dive into a new feature called the Secure Network Supervisor Agent. This tool uses AI to help you monitor and troubleshoot... Read more »

Take a Network Break! We begin with a Red Alert for critical vulnerabilities Kubernetes Gardener. Up next, a threat actor has been squatting on unused CNAME records to distribute malware and spam, and IP Fabric rolls out a new firewall rule simulation capability to let administrators test the effect of firewall rules on traffic patterns.... Read more »

Netris is tackling the issue of automating multi-tenancy in an AI data center. Netris has your answer to this challenge, and it’s a solution certified to work with NVIDIA. We’re going to get into the nuts and bolts of Netris network automation with Alex Saroyan, CEO and co-founder of Netris. Along the way, we will... Read more »

Data Center construction has reached an incredible pace over the last few years with implications on NetOps and operations of all kinds. Today we with talk with sponsor Siemon regarding the state of data centers, past, present and future. We explore legacy data centers and how they are evolving to work in today’s environments. We... Read more »

On today’s episode, we are joined by Dr. Brad Topol, Distinguished Engineer and Director of Open Source Technologies at IBM, to talk about how to scale your leadership. We explore the process of how he went from individual contributor to distinguished engineer to director and executive. We chat about how you build a career... Read more »

On today’s show, we’re going to dig deeper into tunnels and explore some of the quirks and features of tunnels. This week we’ll discuss maximum transmission units (MTUs), maximum segment size, IP fragmentation and more. Today’s bonus material is more RFCs – RFC 4821 and RFC 8899. Episode Links: What Is a Tunnel? – N... Read more »

Damien Garros, CEO and co-founder of OpsMill is with us once again for today’s podcast. Since we last spoke with Damien, OpsMill has emerged from stealth mode and is making progress as one of the leaders in network source of truth in the field. Today, we’ll talk through the progress Infrahub has made and get... Read more »

Wireless security takes center stage in this episode of Packet Protector. Jennifer Minella and guests discuss “secure by default” efforts by WLAN vendors; the current state of PSK, SAE, and WPA3; NAC and zero trust; more WLAN vendors adding AI to their products (or at least their messaging); and more. Jennifer is joined by Jonathan... Read more »

Take a Network Break! Guest co-host Tom Hollingsworth steps in for Johna Johnson. We start with Google patching a significant Chrome vulnerability and de-elevating Chrome running with admin rights when it launches on Windows. On the news front, we discuss a report, unconfirmed as of recording time, that Arista is acquiring VeloCloud, then discuss Broadcom... Read more »

While studying for the CCIE Service Provider certification, Andrew Ohanian assembled a workbook to help him prepare. It’s packed with lab exercises, and Andrew has turned it into a free Web resource that anyone can access. On today’s Heavy Networking, we talk with Andrew about what’s in the guide, the state of the CCIE SP,... Read more »

Michael Costello shares his career journey on today’s Total Network Operations. Currently on the Board of Directors at NANOG and a Distinguished Engineer at Saviynt, Michael talks about his early days learning the ropes as a junior network engineer, trying to start an ISP, his stint in graduate school, and a very interesting role at... Read more »