Take a Network Break! In our Red Alert section we note that memory safety bugs bug Firefox and Thunderbird, and on-prem SharePoint instances are under attack. In tech news, Fortinet adds support for Post Quantum Cryptography in FortiOS, Cato Networks integrates Azure Virtual WANs to its SASE offering, and we weigh the pros and cons ... Read more »
Adyen is a global payments processor whose primary business is providing payment services for merchants, retailers, and venues, as well as online payments. On today’s Heavy Networking we talk about a firewall automation project the company has undertaken. With dozens of change requests coming in every day that need to touch network and host firewalls, ... Read more »...
Auvik is network management software that lets users monitor, manage, and troubleshoot their networks. On today’s sponsored episode we talk with Doug Murray, CEO; and John Harden, Director of Strategy & Technology Evangelism, both from Auvik, about the challenges facing today’s network operators. We look at the rise of the IT generalist, workloads and burnout, ... Read more »...
Laura Santamaria opens the listener mailbag to answer questions, including how to say yes or no to leadership opportunities without tanking your career or trashing your work-life balance. She also explores the mid-year review process and offers tips for successful self-evaluation and paths to self-growth. Episode Links: The Line Between Management and IC Leadership – ... Read more »...
Ethan and Holly continue their OSPF journey this week with OSPF Network Types. They discuss the two main OSPF network types used today: the broadcast and point to point networks. They also explain designated routers, backup designated routers, and when those are used and why. Lastly they discuss some soft skills – knowing your vendor ... Read more »
NautobotGPT is a new AI assistant for Nautobot that helps engineers with network automation, answers questions, recommends tooling, and delivers working code. We discuss the user experience of NautobotGPT with Matthew Schwen, Associate Director of Network Automation at Humana, CoFounder and CTO of PortalCX; and Brad Haas, VP of Professional Services at Network to Code. ... Read more »...
CyberRatings, a non-profit that performs independent testing of security products and services, has released the results of comparative tests it conducted on Secure Service Edge, or SSE, services. Tested vendors include Cisco, Cloudflare, Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks, Skyhigh Security, Versa Networks, and Zscaler. We look at what was tested and how, highlight results, and discuss ... Read more »...
Take a Network Break! We begin with a listener question about a paper critiquing Shor’s Algorithm and quantum computing, and touch on a remote code execution vulnerability in Riverbed SteelCentral NetProfiler / NetExpress 10.8.7. We discuss a Cloudflare BGP misconfiguration that caused the Internet to hiccup, Broadcom’s new Tomahawk Ultra ASIC aimed for–you guessed it–AI ... Read more »...
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 »
