The Fat Pipe - All Packet Pushers Pods
by Packet Pushers
Our most popular pods in one fat feed! Too much technology would never be enough. Includes Heavy Networking, Network Break, Day Two DevOps, Packet Protector, and Network Automation Nerds. Plus new shows when they launch so you know about fresh awesomeness.
Episodes
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TCG089: The Guardrail Paradox
William is joined by Nathan Howard to discuss the Guardrail Paradox and the challenges of deploying frontier AI agents on live enterprise networks. Together they discuss building trust protocols like VIRP, securing enterprise infrastructure against AI hallucinations, and managing the risks of…
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NAN137: Beyond Guardrails: Building Trustworthy and Safe AI Agents for NetOps
Today we dive deep into the architecture of AI agents for network operations, specifically focusing on how to make them trustworthy, safe, and effective in production. Joining us to unpack all of this is Beni Bichsel, Co-Founder and CEO of NetFabric.ai. We discuss the actual network operations...
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HS149: Satcos Vs. Telcos: Who Wins?
Telcos have been offering satellite services as “add-ons” to their terrestrial mobile services, under the paradigm that telcos control the customers and satellites merely provide the connectivity. Scott and Johna debate whether that paradigm is backwards: Might there come a time when satellite...
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PP134: News Roundup – Android OEM Slips Malware Past Google, Hardware Wallets Hacked, and More
It’s a packed security news roundup. We start with a multi-billion dollar crypto heist, plus a hardware supply chain attack against crypto wallets, and then discuss the PHP fire drill. European grocery stores feel the heat from OT cyber attacks, and Google discovers an OEM was slipping malware…
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NB599: CISA’s Chilling Warning for Industrial Fridges; Arista Revenue Hits New Record
Take a Network Break! This week’s episode is a 50-yard dash through the week’s tech news. The Red Alert covers a critical XSS vulnerability in Apache Juneau. In the news, Google courts the US state of Wyoming with a $17 billion pledge for a new data center complex, CISA and other US agencies warn...
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HN850: AWS Takes a Unique Approach to AI Fabrics (Sponsored)
Amazon AWS is not new to the high-bandwidth, elephant flow-oriented data center traffic pattern requirements of AI. In this sponsored episode from AWS, Distinguished Engineer and Network Core VP JR Rivers and Senior Principal Networking Engineer Stephen Callaghan join Ethan and Drew to discuss...
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TNO079: Automation for the People
We’ve seen the capability that automation tooling has enabled for hyperscaler environments and beyond, but not enough emphasis is being put on improving the quality of life for network engineers and network operators. Scott Robohn is joined by Senior Principal Network Development Engineer Dave…
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N4N069: An Engineer’s Perspective on Agentic AI (Sponsored)
If you’re working on your CCNA you’re learning a lot of CLI, configuration tasks, and so on. But if AI can handle that for you, how much CLI do you really need to know? On today’s sponsored episode, Sergio Freitas, an Engineering Director at Cisco, joins Ethan and Holly to explain how AI agents...
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LIU026: Girard Kavelines: Life Sucks – Dealing with Burnout
Network and security engineer Girard Kavelines joins Alexis and Kevin to discuss his journey in tech, the realities of balancing a demanding career with raising seven children, and his approach to overcoming burnout. Together they discuss the intersection of IT disciplines, the value of career...
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D2DO318: Navigating Open-Source Model Providers
Kyler and Ned are joined by Mo Moustafa, creator of Ollybot, to explore the complexities of running open-source models through OpenRouter. Together they delve into model tuning, experiments with model providers, the roiling chaos that is the current state of inference as a service, and more.…
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NAN136: Outcome-Oriented Automation: Building What Matters (Sponsored)
Network automation projects often stall or face disruption when management can’t see tangible business outcomes. In this sponsored episode, Alex Henthorn-Iwane and Kyle Scarmardo of Gluware join Eric Chou to explore Outcome-Oriented Automation to avoid the merry-go-round of justification.…
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HW092: Probe Request – a Wi-Fi Community Project
Keith Parsons talks with Stephen Cooper about Probe Request, a free community driven mentoring platform designed to connect Wi-Fi and networking professionals. Stephen explains how Probe Request helps junior engineers by pairing them with experienced mentors willing to share their expertise. By...
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PP133: An Inside Look at SRX Firewall Threat Prevention Capabilities (Sponsored)
On today’s Packet Protector we get a good look at HPE Networking’s SRX firewall, including recently updated product families for branch locations. We’ll get an overview of speeds and feeds, and then dig into threat protection capabilities, AI integration, and more. If your firewall fleet is…
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NB598: Fortinet, Cato Roll Out Security Controls for AI; Intel Buys Quantum Software Startup
Take a Network Break! Our Red Alert sounds for active exploits against an Arista VeloCloud Orchestrator vulnerability. In the news, Fortinet launches new cloud-based capabilities to spot and stop unwanted AI agent actions, Cato Networks announces new software to provide visibility and control…
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N4N068: Meter’s Networking Grants Program (Sponsored)
Networking vendor Meter has recently launched their brand new Networking Grants program, putting money on the table to help you in your learning journey. In this sponsored episode, Matt Heim, Head of Partner Enablement at Meter, joins Ethan and Holly to explain why Meter created the program, how…
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HN849: Meter Acquires Packet Pushers
Packet Pushers has been acquired by Meter. On this special Heavy Networking episode, guest host Scott Robohn talks with Ethan Banks and Anil Varanasi, CEO of Meter, about the acquisition. Ethan and Anil explain how this relationship will work (including full editorial independence for Packet...
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HN848: NetClaw: Your Open Source Network Assistant
John Capobianco returns to Heavy Networking to discuss his latest open source project, NetClaw. NetClaw is an automation assistant for network engineers that leverages MCP and has a robust security architecture to ensure production safety. John is here to explain why and how he built NetClaw, and...
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IPB211: Announcing Windows 11 IPv6 CLAT with Jim Alumbaugh
Ed, Nick, and Tom are joined by Jim Alumbaugh, Technical Program Manager for Windows Networking Protocols, to discuss the newly released IPv6 Windows CLAT support for Wi-Fi and Ethernet interfaces. Jim explains how this feature enables enterprises to accelerate migration to IPv6-mostly networks....
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D2DO317: Building the Operational Reality for Sandboxed Agents in Production (Sponsored)
In this sponsored episode, Michael Levan and Nathan Pearce of Solo.io join Kyler and Ned to explore how to run AI agents securely at enterprise scale. Together they break down key architectural challenges such as maintaining state, implementing secure sandboxes, and optimizing resources with...
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TCG088: Cheaper Models, Expensive Workflows: Where AI ROI Actually Shows Up
William Collins and Eyvonne Sharp discuss how smaller models change AI application economics, when hybrid routing and caching pay off, and why multi-call agents can still produce large cloud bills. They examine the evidence behind enterprise AI ROI and outline a practical way to measure cost per...
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NAN135: Unpacking the NetOps Stack
Eric Chou is joined by Mauricio Rojas, Principal DevOps Consulting Engineer at Nokia, to unpack how the stack of Kubernetes, GitOps, and open-source tooling can fundamentally transform modern networks. Together they discuss Mauricio’s NetOpsKube project, Broadband Network Gateways (BNGs), the…
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PP132: What the Death Star Can Teach Us About OT Security
On today’s episode we talk about what security teams can learn about OT security from the Death Star. Guest John Burns recaps his CYBR.SEC.CON talk “The Empire Had a SOC — And Still Got Blown Up Twice”. We jump off from this delightfully nerdy framing to get into serious matters around OT…
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HS148: Expertise, Layoffs, AI, and You
Since the dot-com bubble burst around the turn of the century, the US economy has seen periods of huge layoffs in IT. AI may be driving another such event, whether in slow motion as companies lay off staff thinking they can be replaced by AI, or suddenly in the event of an abrupt bursting of......
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NB597: Extreme Announces Autonomous AI Agent; Cisco Debuts OT Security Cert
Take a Network Break! Our Red Alert sounds for HPE wireless OS vulnerabilities and for serious vulnerabilities in PHP and node.js. Security alerts carry us into the news as Fortinet releases a tranche of software updates to address vulnerabilities the company discovered using frontier AI.…
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TNO078: Designing Networks for Operations
Scott Robohn welcomes Bruce Davie and Larry Peterson from Systems Approach to discuss the new edition of Computer Networks: A Systems Approach and their blog post on reality-based network operations. Together they explore the contrast between clean-slate tooling and the pragmatic realities of...
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HN847: Building Trust In The Agentic NOC (Sponsored)
Many network engineers don’t trust AI, in part because the tech is non-deterministic and can behave in unanticipated ways. Simultaneously, the networking industry is baking AI functions deeply into operations, which has proven useful, but engineers still have their misgivings. Are these…
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N4N067: Level Up Your Home Network for Gaming
Thanks to a listener request, today’s episode talks about how to optimize your home network for gaming. Ethan and Holly discuss key factors such as latency, connection type, and bandwidth congestion as well as how wired connections, server selection, and active queue management can directly…
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LIU025: Dale Wheeler: What the Forklift?
Alexis and Kevin are joined by network technician and content creator Dale Wheeler to explore his career from forklift driver into IT. Together they discuss the pros and cons of traditional college degrees versus certifications, the realities of working IT in the public education sector, and the...
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D2DO316: Local AI Foundations
Ned Bellavance gets to be the guest on today’s show to discuss foundational AI knowledge, inference training, and running local models with Kyler Middleton. Together, they break down practical approaches to local model execution, comparing performance trade-offs and how engineers can safely...
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TCG087: AI FinOps, Governance, and Cloud Strategy with Gartner (Sponsored)
AI adoption is replaying many of cloud’s early mistakes, but agentic systems introduce a broader spending population, nondeterministic costs, and systems that can act on their own. In this sponsored episode, Eyvonne and William are joined by Ang Troy and Douglas Toombs from Gartner to discuss…
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NAN134: Building Trust in AI-Driven Networking (Sponsored)
Network engineers are constantly looking at how AI is reshaping operations, moving beyond simple scripts to the future of self-driving networks. Joining Eric to dive deep into agentic AI workflows and AI-Native automation in this sponsored episode are two true pioneers in this space from HPE: Bob...
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HW091: WLAN Pi – MCP & OS Updates
Keith Parsons and Nick Turner discuss the latest WLAN Pi OS updates including the integration of model context protocol (MCP) for AI agent interaction. They also discuss Wi-Fi 7 multi-link operation (MLO) testing and simultaneous transmit and receive (STR) capabilities. Episode Links: WLAN Pi
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PP131: Making Security Awareness Training Actually Effective; Plus, How IT and OT Overlaps
In this double-header episode, JJ and Drew talk with two cybersecurity experts. First up, Jayson E Street talks about how to make security awareness training effective and engaging. Instead of having employees sit through a video or lecture, or get scolded for failing a phishing test, Jayson’s...
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HS147: Architecting Infrastructure to Meet Your AI Ambitions (Sponsored)
Many a IT professional is having the AI football tossed to them, “We need to implement in house AI, go do it”. If this is you, what questions should you be asking of yourself and of leadership? Getting traction accommodating vast new workloads with new and different behaviors is a challenge…
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Tech Bytes: Meter Offers Up to $2,000 for New Network Engineers to Lab and Learn (Sponsored)
Today on the Tech Bytes podcast, we learn about Meter Grants. This is a new program from networking vendor Meter that offers up to $2,000 in grants for early-career network engineers who are looking to get certified or advance their learning. We’ll talk about how the program works, who’s eligible...
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NB596: Cisco, NVIDIA Plug New Optical Form Factor; TSMC Etches Another Record Quarter
Take a Network Break! Our Red Alert sounds for Nutanix Prism Gateway. Our news discussion covers a new pluggable optical form factor being pushed by Cisco and Nvidia, ORCA Computing launching a new quantum computer to run alongside GPUs, and New York University and New York City partnering to…
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TNO077: From “Is It the Network?” to Continuous Assurance with NetBeez (Sponsored)
In this sponsored episode Scott is joined by Stefano Gridelli, cofounder and CEO of NetBeez, to discuss continuous network experience assurance and moving beyond reactive troubleshooting. Together they break down how NetBeez uses user-perspective monitoring, distributed sensors, and AI-assisted...
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HN846: How Meter Built a Topology Design Tool to Speed Deployments from Hours to Seconds (Sponsored)
In this sponsored episode, Alex La Fazia and Daniel Kaczmarczyk of Meter explain how they built an internal tool to automate network topology creation, drastically reducing design time from hundreds of hours to seconds. They share how they relied on a deterministic rules engine to ensure…
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IPB210: IPv6-Mostly Is Really Dual-Stack
IPv6-mostly is a foothold to get from your dual-stack network to a much more predominantly IPv6-run network, but the reality is that IPv6-mostly has a whole set of dependencies about the fact that IPv4 exists on the network. Ed, Nick and Tom discuss the realities of IPv6-mostly networks such as...
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N4N066: Access Lists
Ethan and Holly are back to walk us through Access Lists. Access Lists regularly appear in networking device configurations and aren’t just for security. Ethan and Holly break down what an access list is, how an access-list is processed, the various ways we might use an access list, and more....
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TCG086: Why Training AI to Have a Self Makes Governance Harder
John Capobianco returns to the show to discuss the latest developments in Model Context Protocol (MCP) and agentic infrastructure. John and host William Collins weigh in on the ongoing debate on AI consciousness, constitutional guardrails, and model welfare policies. They also look at emerging...
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NAN133: Beyond the Hype: The Realities of AI Infrastructure
Eric Chou speaks with Leo Fleskes on the pressing infrastructure challenges surrounding AI resource consumption, including data centers’ massive water and power demands. Together they discuss local community pushback, regulatory constraints, and the economic viability of AI providers. AdSpot...
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Tech Bytes: Get Ahead of AI-Driven Vulnerabilities with Frontier Virtual Patching (Sponsored)
Today on Tech Bytes we explore frontier virtual patching with sponsor Palo Alto Networks. Palo Alto Networks recently announced frontier virtual patching as part of PAN-OS 12.2. We’ll talk about how this release can help IT and OT organizations deal with the increased speed and scale of...
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PP130: News Roundup—FBI and Pentagon Breached, AI Amplifies Threat Actors, UK Rolls Out Passkey Option, and More
Our October news roundup is a boiling cauldron of consternation. The FBI and the Pentagon suffered breaches, serious exploits are targeting network gear, and researchers discover a lone threat actor who successfully hit hundreds of sites with the help of AI agents. Infostealer malware is...
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HS146: Costly Choices and Forced Dollars – Thanks AI
Sometimes IT is forced to spend money to do nothing. It might be the cost of evaluating the products and services you don’t end up deploying. Or it’s the cost of scrambling to disable new functionality–mostly AI features these days–in existing apps and services, so it can be evaluated and...
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NB595: Arista Racks Up New AI Infrastructure Options; Arelion Expands Existing Fiber Optics Capacity
Take a Network Break! We startup with follow-up on global tech news coverage and pronunciations, then pivot to Red Alerts about Dell Container Storage and SonicWall. This week’s news includes a quantum networking controller prototype from Cisco, new rack-scale AI architecture options from Arista,...
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TNO076: Observability and Automation for AI Networking
Christian Adell and David Flores join host Scott Robohn to discuss the intersection of observability, automation, and networking in AI data centers. With AI data centers linking thousands or tens of thousands of GPUs, observability becomes a huge challenge. Scott and guests dig into those...
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HN845: Real Life Use Cases for BGP Monitoring Protocol (BMP)
Bart Dorlandt discusses the practical applications and architecture of the BGP Monitoring Protocol (BMP) for service providers. Bart has developed a BMP application to help his customers monitor BGP. He talks about how he handles data collection, why it’s important to capture pre- and post-policy...
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LIU024: Dennis Thankachan: Lightyear and Beyond
Lightyear CEO and co-founder Dennis Thankachan shares his transition from investment banking to entrepreneurship and the lessons learned from his early startup failure. He also discusses the creation of Lightyear, the implementation of AI in network operations, and shares some actionable advice…
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D2DO315: Running Agents Securely at Scale
Ned and Kyler explore the challenges and best practices of running AI agents securely at scale with guest Michael Levan. Together they discuss operational realities of agentic workloads such as specialized AI gateways, semantic routing, sandboxing, and the importance of robust observability...
About this show
Our most popular pods in one fat feed! Too much technology would never be enough. Includes Heavy Networking, Network Break, Day Two DevOps, Packet Protector, and Network Automation Nerds. Plus new shows when they launch so you know about fresh awesomeness.
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