We turn the nerd meter up to eleven on today’s episode with longtime friend of the show, Russ White. First we dive into how an Ethernet adapter knows when a link is lost, where Russ teaches us all about loss of carrier and OAM. He also gives us a tutorial on how the rest of... Read more ..read more

Keith Gregory teaches us about data engineering in a way DevOps folks (and hydrologists) can understand. He explains that the role of a data engineer is to create pipelines to transport data from metaphorical rivers and make it usable for data analysts. Keith walks us through the testing process; the difference between streaming pipelines and... Read more ..read more

What’s the difference between cybersecurity “as a service” vs. “managed” vs. “hosted”? And what’s the difference between an MSP and an MSSP? In this episode, JJ helps untangle the terms and concepts in cybersecurity offerings. She explains what questions you should ask vendors to make sure you’re picking the right one for your needs; negotiating... Read more ..read more

Why are some executives still insisting on Return to Office policies? Does it improve culture and productivity like they swear? Or is it more about the devaluing of a massive asset on their books: Commercial real estate. If the value of commercial real estate drops, companies have less to leverage for loans and– perhaps more... Read more ..read more

Take a Network Break! This week we cover a new microsegmentation offering from Arista, new GenAI assistants from Fortinet, and a GenAI firewall from Versa Networks to monitor and report on how organizations are using generative AI tools and applications. AWS will stop selling VMware Cloud on AWS (but you can still get it through... Read more ..read more

Network monitoring is growing increasingly complicated. Companies are facing more distributed applications and more remote employees. NetBeez, our sponsor today, is here to talk about how they monitor network performance in real time for the campus, WAN, and more. From proactively testing networks after configuration changes to identifying how well a worker’s laptop is connecting... Read more ..read more

The future has arrived: 800 gig Ethernet is here. Amit Bhardwaj and Dmitry Shokarev from today’s sponsor, Juniper Networks, join the show to tell us all about Juniper’s 800 gig Ethernet and what we need to know as engineers: use cases, transition plans, fiber and power needs (a lot less than you’d think). We also... Read more ..read more

As part of our ongoing series on IPv6 basics, today we cover the differences you should be aware of between ICMPv4 and ICMPv6. Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) is the protocol that lets you test reachability: Pings, echoes, TCP connections, etc. We explain what you need to know and why you need to know it,... Read more ..read more

Hey, everyone. Ethan here with a behind-the-scenes administrative request. Several thousand of you subscribe to the Packet Pushers’ Fat Pipe. In the Fat Pipe, we’ve been stuffing every single podcast we produce. The problem is that we produce way too many shows–one almost every weekday–for the average podcast client to absorb them all. We can... Read more ..read more

The classical encryption algorithms that currently undergird our IT infrastructure will be broken once there’s a powerful and stable enough quantum computer to do the job. Quantum-resistant algorithms are being developed by NIST, but implementation and deployment of these algorithms still have to be addressed. So what does all this mean for busy IT and... Read more ..read more