Monitoring and troubleshooting latency can be tricky. If it’s in the network, was it the IP stack? A NIC? A switch buffer? A middlebox somewhere on the WAN? If it’s the application, can you, the network engineer, bring receipts to the app team? And what if you need to build and operate a network that’s ... Read more »
New technologies, tools, and innovations help move IT forward, but it can be hard for users to keep up. Network Automation Nerds welcomes guest William Collins, a dynamic force in the world of technology. As a passionate tech evangelist, he helps to bridge the gap between emerging technologies such as AI and everyday users with ... Read more »
Faddom is re-envisioning what application dependency mapping and infrastructure inventory can be in the era of cloud and hybrid IT. Join us today on this sponsored episode as we speak with Faddom’s Itamar Rotem, CPO and Ofer Regev, CTO, about how Faddom’s discovery process can help to improve migrations for any size organization and help ... Read more »...
Our airwaves are alive with radio frequencies (RF). Right now billions of devices around the world are chattering invisibly over Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, and other protocols you might not have heard of. On today’s show we peer into the invisible world to better understand the RF threat environment. Our guest is Brett Walkenhorst, CTO of ... Read more »
Take a Network Break! We start with follow-ups regarding the 7-year-old Cisco bug, risks of AI agents, and Anthropic forcing you to opt out or have your chats saved for five years. Then we highlight a serious vulnerability (which is being exploited in the wild) in Citrix NetScaler ADC and Netscaler Gateway systems. On the ... Read more »
How might we get network traffic from Earth to a lunar base? Or Mars? Or to spaceships carrying astronauts or probes exploring space? And how do we get it back? The problem, among other things, is latency. The answer isn’t TCP/IP. The answer is…complicated. On today’s Heavy Networking we explore the challenges of getting packets ... Read more »
Vint Cerf, widely recognized as one of the fathers of the Internet, is today’s special guest on Total Network Operations. He currently serves as Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google. His pioneering work began back in the 1960’s when he was involved in the ARPANET project. Alongside Bob Kahn, Vint co-invented the TCP/IP ... Read more »...
It’s time to talk crypto. No, not the Bitcoin kind. Ethan and Holly introduce the basics of IPsec, the protocol that authenticates and encrypts traffic between endpoints. They discuss what it is, how it provides trustworthiness and secrecy to IP traffic, and common use cases. They review the different types of IPsec protocols and modes, ... Read more »
In the changing landscape of AI data infrastructure, F5 and MinIO are partnering on a solution that brings together the best of each company. This solution bookends the AI stack—it uses F5 for reliable, secure, and observable data delivery and MinIO’s AIStor for storage of all data types. The goal is to help organizations be ... Read more »
Take a Network Break! We double-dip on red alerts as the FBI warns that Russian state hackers are targeting a seven-year-old vulnerability on Cisco IOS and IOS-XE devices (a patch has been available for seven years), and a compromised XZ Utils backdoor is still lurking in some Docker images. Palo Alto Networks has added support ... Read more »
Today’s episode is all about high-performance memory in switches. We dig into the differences among TCAM, SRAM, DRAM, and HBM, and all the complex tradeoffs that go into allocating memory resources to networking functions. If you’ve ever had to select a Switching Database Manager template or done similar operations on a switch, this is your ... Read more »
On today’s Total Network Operations we talk through the adoption of AI in network operations with John Capobianco, Head of DevRel at Selector. Selector is the sponsor of today’s episode. John walks us through his career journey as a network engineer, and describes the moment where he realized that AI was going to change how ... Read more »
Democratizing the learning environment is a passion for Deepak Ahuja. So much so, he founded CloudMyLab, a company that provides hands-on, cloud-based labs and networking environments. His goal is to offer an affordable lab-as-a-service for two groups of people: network engineers seeking certifications, and network engineers and automators that need a place to safely test ... Read more »...
Microsoft is rethinking allowing endpoint security software to run in the Windows kernel (including third-party and Microsoft’s own endpoint security software). While there are benefits to running security software in the kernel, there are also serious downsides (see the CrowdStrike outage). Dan Massameno joins JJ and Drew on Packet Protector to talk about the role ... Read more »...
Take a Network Break! We start with critical vulnerabilities in Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center and Fortinet’s FortiSIEM. On the news front, SonicWall announces Gen8 firewalls plus a $200,000 warranty for customers that sign on to SonicWall’s Managed Protection Security Suite. IBM Cloud suffers its fourth major outage since May of this year, SASE vendor ... Read more »...
LLMs and AI-powered chatbots are becoming a regular feature of network operations tools and vendor product portfolios. Now the next iteration of AI in network ops and automation is likely to be agentic. On today’s Heavy Networking, sponsored by HPE Juniper Networking, we talk about what agentic AI actually means, how AI agents will accomplish ... Read more »
Building things for people to use has been our guest’s goal since entering university in the 1960s. Total Network Operations is delighted to welcome Jack Haverty, who’s been instrumental in ARPANET operations and innovation, the development of TCP, and more. He takes us through the history of the internet from the early days of ARPANET, ... Read more »...
Ethan and Holly bring you the last installment of the OSPF series discussing OSPF area types. They discuss why OSPF areas exist, do a quick recap of what OSPF areas actually are, and then introduce the different types of OSPF areas. Lastly, see if you can answer Ethan’s rapid-fire OSPF questions. Episode Transcript: This episode ... Read more »
Developers Rizel Scarlett and Ian Douglas join Ned and Kyler to talk about building an AI agent. Rizel and Ian work at Block, where they’re part of a team building an agent called Goose. They talk about what the agent does, building challenges, observability, and more. They also dive into topics such as how using AI ... Read more »
Packet Protector goes global for today’s security news roundup. Microsoft discontinues a program in which engineers in China supported the US Department of Defense’s cloud infrastructure (with the help of US ‘digital escorts’), Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC fires several employees over allegations of attempted theft of sensitive tech, an Arizona woman gets 8 years in prison ... Read more »...
Take a Network Break! We start with follow-up on post-quantum support in firewalls and DPDK, then highlight a command injection vulnerability in Ruckus SmartZone software. In tech news, Broadcom rolls out the Jericho4 ASIC to help scale AI across multiple data centers, InfoBlox beefs up DNS protection to spot malicious domains faster, and HPE announces ... Read more »...
Perhaps the biggest question around adopting network automation is whether you should build a solution using open source tools and a lot of coding glue, or buy a network automation platform from a vendor and construct your automation solution on top of that. Either way has tradeoffs. Network engineer Lee Harper joins Heavy Networking to ... Read more »
Optical networks are an essential component of networking, but don’t get much attention. Today we shine a spotlight on the intersection of optical networks and the software that automates them. Our guest is Michal Pecek, consultant and teacher in optical communication, whose work has transformed organizations including Google and Alcatel-Lucent (now Nokia). From pioneering flexible DWDM ... Read more »...
From SAML to OAuth to FIDO2 to passwordless promises, we unpack what’s working—and what’s broken—in the world of identity and authentication. Today on the Packet Protector podcast, we’re joined by the always thoughtful and occasionally provocative Wolf Goerlich, former Duo advisor, and now a practicing CISO in the public sector. We also talk about authorization ... Read more »...
Take a Network Break! Guest opinionator Tom Hollingsworth joins Johna Johnson to opine on the latest tech news. On the vulnerability front, several versions of BentoML are open to a server side request forgery. Looking at tech news, Intel will spin out its networking and edge group as it continues cost-cutting, Palo Alto Networks makes ... Read more »
On Heavy Networking today, AI operations for networking. That is, how do we delegate some amount of responsibility for network operations to artificial intelligence? Cisco is our sponsor, and our guests are Omar Sultan, Director for Product Management of Automation and AI; and Javier Antich, Chief Mad Scientist for AI (yes, that’s his title!). We talk ... Read more »...
What’s the next era of network management and operations? Total Network Operations talks to Mahesh Jethanandani, Area Director(AD) for all of Operations and Management (OPS) at IETF and Distinguished Engineer at Arrcus. Mahesh describes a workshop from December of 2024 that sought to investigate the past, present, and future of network management and operations. He ... Read more »...
We ask listeners for follow up and you’ve sent it in. On today’s show we respond to listener comments and corrections on tunneling, the link aggregation control protocol, link aggregation in general, and DHCP options. We also talk about the network engineering certification journey. If you’ve got a “Well, actually” or any other follow up, ... Read more »
On today’s show, we talk to Armon Dadgar, co-founder and CTO of HashiCorp regarding HashiCorp’s future within IBM. We start with a quick recap of IBM’s acquisition of HashiCorp and then move on to the challenges of bringing a small, young tech company into a huge corporation that makes lots of its revenue on legacy ... Read more »
Mobile devices blur the boundaries between personal and work devices and are packed with sensitive information, making them popular targets for malware, spyware, and data collection. On today’s Packet Protector we dig into strategies for managing threats to mobile devices with guest Akili Akridge. Akili started his career pulling burner phones off suspects as a ... Read more »
