PACKET CAPTURE / Week of November 10-14, 2025

Author

Summerset Banks
November 14, 2025

FYI 

  • Going to AutoCon 4? Packet Pushers hosts Ethan Banks, Drew Conry-Murray, William Collins, Eyvonne Sharp, Scott Robohn and Eric Chou will be there! Message them in the Packet Pushers Slack community to connect with them in Austin, TX USA Nov. 17-21, 2025.

JOB ALERTS

Current postings from the Packet Pushers Slack Group

NEW PODCASTS

EP 551 | NOVEMBER 10, 2025

Cisco Adds AI to Tech Support; Cryptography Hits a Post-Quantum Milestone

Can AI improve Cisco tech support and professional services? The company hopes to find out with its new Cisco IQ platform. We dig into details on today's Network Break, along with more Cisco product and cert news, a cryptography milestone in the use of post-quantum encryption, a bountiful Q3 for Arista, and more tech news and analysis. | LISTEN NOW

EP 086 | NOVEMBER 11, 2025

Using Let’s Encrypt and the ACME Protocol for Domain Validation Certificates


Certificates are the socks of IT—everyone needs them, and you always lose track of a few. On today's show we dive into the ACME protocol, an IETF standard to help automate how a domain owner gets a domain validation certificate from a Certificate Authority (CA). Our guest, Ed Harmoush, demystifies the ACME protocol and the Let’s Encrypt service, which uses the ACME protocol. Ed discusses ACME clients and servers and walks us step-by-step through how the protocol works. He also explains how certificate automation can save your sanity by eliminating "calendar roulette." | LISTEN NOW

EP 116 | NOVEMBER 11, 2025

Nth-Party Risk May Put You on the (Block) Chain Gang

The evolution of the modern, Internet-driven economy has created the conditions for essentially unbounded Nth-party risks (that is, risks from your suppliers, and risks from your suppliers' suppliers, and risks from your suppliers' suppliers' suppliers, ad infinitum). Nth party risks exist in public clouds, SaaS, software and hardware supply chains, and now in the form of agentic AI and the Model Control Protocol (MCP). So let's talk about these risks, possible ways of dealing with them (including Software Bills of Material and blockchain), and how to adapt your enterprise strategy for the realities of Nth-party risks. | LISTEN NOW

EP 106| NOVEMBER 12, 2025

Unimus: Network Automation By and For Network Engineers (Sponsored)

Tomas Kirnak, CEO of Unimus, joins Eric Chou in this sponsored episode to introduce Unimus, an on-premise network configuration management system built by network engineers to solve real-world problems. In this deep dive they discuss Unimus’ proprietary “Behavioral Tree” for automatic device discovery, the platform's vendor support, the 70/30 rule, and lowering the barrier for entry into automation. | LISTEN NOW

EP 062 | NOVEMBER 12, 2025

The Tech Expertise Deficit with Russ White

Today we delve into the tech expertise deficit and why technical depth and decades of doing the work matter more than social media followers and content creation hype. Our guest is Russ White, engineer, author, teacher, and certification developer.  We begin with current events in AI, and then investigate the differences between career and influence and engineering and leadership. We also look at the value of mentorship. Russ leaves engineers both new and experienced with some advice - to develop deep expertise, learn the theory behind the technology. | LISTEN NOW

EP 004 | NOVEMBER 13, 2025

From Fast Food to Leading Operations at an ISP

Think you need a degree or a ton of certificates to succeed in tech? Think again. Matthew Oborne joins our hosts Alexis Bertholf and Kevin Nanns to discuss how he went from working fast food to leading operations at an ISP. Your starting point doesn’t define your ceiling; resilience, adaptability, and a willingness to learn can take you further than you think. Matthew shares his career journey and emphasizes the value of building personal and business relationships. | LISTEN NOW

EP 805 | NOVEMBER 14, 2025

The Past, Present, and Future of NANOG

NANOG, or the North American Network Operation Group, is an organization committed to the continuing advancement of an open, secure, and robust Internet. At the NANOG Conference 95 in late October 2025, Ethan Banks chatted with Steve Feldman, a member of NANOG's Board of Directors. Steve has been involved with NANOG since the very first meeting, and recounts how and why NANOG began and the journey to what it is today. Ethan and Steve also talk about the future of NANOG and how the event can evolve while continuing to provide technical education to, and serve as a community gathering for, network operators. | LISTEN NOW

NEW VIDEO

LATEST BLOG POSTS

DREW CONRY-MURRAY | NOVEMBER 10, 2025

Cisco IQ Brings AI to Cisco Tech Support, Professional Services, and VARs

AI is coming to Cisco technical support and professional services. Cisco has announced Cisco IQ, a platform to bring AI and automation to the customer lifecycle across product planning and design, deployment, management, and securing and optimizing Cisco technology.

Cisco is also positioning Cisco IQ as a tool that partners and resellers can use to help support their own customers. | READ NOW

KENNY HEINDEL | NOVEMBER 10, 2025

From Hours to Minutes: Real-World NetSecOps with Network Automation

The following sponsored blog post was written by Kenny Heindel, Product Marketing Manager - Network Management at OpenText. We thank OpenText for being a sponsor. Meet OpenText at AutoCon4 in Austin, Nov 17-21.

Network security teams and network operations teams have always shared responsibility for protecting infrastructure, but collaboration has not always been seamless. Too often, it still looks like this: InfoSec identifies a threat, sends a ticket, and then the network team drops everything to manually update firewalls. Multiply that by hundreds of firewalls and dozens of tickets per week, and it’s easy to see how this reactive cycle breaks down.

This is exactly the challenge one customer faced, and solved, with network automation. What began as a manual, error-prone, time-consuming routine became a NetSecOps success story that prevented outages, improved speed and accuracy, and freed up engineering resources. Let’s walk through what happened. | READ NOW

DREW CONRY-MURRAY | NOVEMBER 12, 2025

Red Hat to Highlight Ansible Automation Platform 2.6 at AutoCon 4

Red Hat will tout three key features in the 2.6 release of its Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) at the AutoCon 4 conference. These features are:

  • An automation dashboard to help measure ROI

  • The Lightspeed genAI intelligent assistant

  • A self-service automation portal | READ NOW

DREW CONRY-MURRAY | NOVEMBER 13, 2025

OpenText Brings Its Network Observability Platform to AutoCon 4

OpenText recently announced the general availability of Network Observability, which brings together network operations management, network automation, network monitoring, and cloud network visibility into a single platform.

I was briefed by OpenText about this new platform as part of OpenText's sponsorship of the AutoCon 4 conference. Here's what I learned.

The Network Observability platform has a venerable heritage; it comes out of HP OpenView for network monitoring and Opsware for configuration management. It supports more than 250 vendors and over 3,500 device types.

This new instantiation integrates modern features, such as support for REST APIs and the ability to observe hybrid cloud networks, with its core capabilities. These capabilities include end-to-end network visibility; topology-aware monitoring; synthetic testing; and correlation of logs, device configurations, and performance data. It also offers a refreshed UI. | READ NOW