Packet Pushers - Weekly Show

Today's Heavy Networking explores the challenges Wireless ISPs (WISPs) face when bringing services to locations without a lot of fiber in the ground. Those challenges include lining up radio antennas, maintaining mountaintop gear, wild horses, network and routing designs, and more. Our guest is Bradley Thompson, Senior Network Engineer at SkyFiber Internet. The post Heavy Networking 679: Mountaintop Networking And Long-Haul Wireless appeared first on Packet Pushers.

On today's Heavy Networking we dive into the frameworks commonly used by service providers to tackle network slicing and traffic engineering challenges. We'll also talk their pros and cons, and the approach that Cisco is seeing its customers adopt as providers create virtual networking products for their customers. Cisco is our sponsor for today's show. The post Heavy Networking 678: How Cisco Enables Orchestration, Network Slicing Across Service Provider Networks (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

You ever want a group of fellow networking nerds to hang with once in a while? The US Networking User Association might be exactly what you’re looking for. With local networking user groups popping up in various places all over the US and soon other countries, the USNUA is fostering community and knowledge sharing for networkers everywhere. On today's Heavy Networking we speak with Jason Gintert and Chris Kane, two of the folks behind the USNUA organization, to discuss what the USNUA is, and how you can work with them to get a NUG started in your area. The post Heavy Networking 677: US Networking User Association – Meetups For Network Engineers appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Fortinet is a security vendor most of you have heard of. But if all you think of when you hear the name “Fortinet” is firewalls, well yeah, but you should think more broadly. On today's sponsored Heavy Networking we're going after the work-from-anywhere challenge with Fortinet’s Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) tech, all of which is baked into FortiOS. If you’re running a FortiGate, you’ve got these capabilities already. The post Heavy Networking 676: Implementing ZTNA And SASE With Fortinet (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Today’s Heavy Networking podcast explores the concept of NetDevOps with sponsor Itential. The idea behind NetDevOps is to advance your network to the point where it’s self-service; that is, the network you operate can be consumed the way public cloud services are consumed. Our guest is Itential co-founder & CTO Chris Wade. The post Heavy Networking 675: Enabling Self-Service Automation & NetDevOps With Itential (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

On today’s Heavy Networking we get into IPv6 essentials for network engineers, including how to incorporate IPv6 support in upcoming projects, how IPv6 affects NAT and subnetting, what the heck Happy Eyeballs and nibble boundaries are, and why you should approach IPv6 with a mindset of abundance not scarcity. The post Heavy Networking 674: IPv6 Essentials For Network Engineers – Think Abundance, Not Scarcity appeared first on Packet Pushers.

You know all those Apple and other IoT devices connected to your wireless network? Lots of them run apps that discover services on your network via multicast DNS (mDNS). All of that mDNS traffic can have a significant impact on your WLAN’s performance. On today's Heavy Networking we talk with guest Bryan Ward who has actually measured the impact of mDNS on a production wireless network to see what would happen if he let mDNS traffic run wild. The post Heavy Networking 673: Multicast DNS Gone Wild On Your WLAN appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Lots of folks suffer from impostor syndrome. Tech is complex--how could you know what you’re doing? And yet, many of us are responsible for incredibly complex IT systems. Fake it ‘til you make it, right? To handle the cognitive dissonance of impostor syndrome, we overcompensate. In doing so, we pay a personal price. Today's Heavy Networking guest is Matt Vitale. He's here to share what he's learned about coping with and overcoming imposter syndrome. The post Heavy Networking 672: Overcoming Your Imposter Syndrome appeared first on Packet Pushers.

On today's Heavy Networking we sub in a podcast from our Heavy Strategy channel. Greg Ferro from the Packet Pushers and Johna Till Johnson, CEO of Nemertes Research, discuss the impacts of ChatGPT and AI on the technology workspace, including whether human workers can partner with these tools to increase productivity and improve technology experiences. They don't have answers, but they do have unanswered questions. The post Heavy Networking 671: Is ChatGPT Coming For Your Job? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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. The post Heavy Networking 670: The Challenges And Satisfactions Of Building And Running A Mastodon Instance appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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. The post Heavy Networking 669: Graphiant’s Network Edge Service Rethinks SD-WAN (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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. The post Heavy Networking 668: Inside A Virtualization Consultant’s Home Lab appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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. The post Heavy Networking 667: Broadcom’s NetOps Delivers End-User Visibility Into SD-WAN (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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. The post Heavy Networking 666: Improving Quality Of Experience With LibreQoS appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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 The post Heavy Networking 665: Augtera Network AI Automates NetOps And Works To Prevent Incidents (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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. The post Heavy Networking 664: Semantic Networking – Science Project Or Networking’s Future? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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. The post Heavy Networking 663: OpenAI For Networking appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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. The post Heavy Networking 662: Home Lab In The Cloud Or Your Basement? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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 post Heavy Networking 661: Home Labbing With EVE-NG And Juniper appeared first on Packet Pushers.

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. The post Heavy Networking 660: Writing The Manual – An Insider’s View Of Product Documentation appeared first on Packet Pushers.