EP 550 | NOVEMBER 3, 2025

A Cornucopia of AI Switches; DNS Strikes Again

Today's Network Break discusses a DNS issue that triggered a major Azure outage; a multitude of AI Ethernet switch platforms from Arista, Cisco, and Celestica; new AI security capabilities in Palo Alto Networks' Prisma AIRS; Qualcomm going after data center AI inferencing, a strong Q3 performance from Celestica; and more IT news commentary. | LISTEN NOW

EP 064 | NOVEMBER 4, 2025

An Introduction to nOversight

nOversight is a Wi-Fi analysis app from Numerous Networks for iOS and Mac iOS that helps both end users and professionals do a better job of understanding how their Wi-Fi is running and how it's working on their individual devices. Today we talk to Ben Toner, the creator of nOversight to give us the details on the inspiration for the product and a few of the details of how it works to map live Wi-Fi signal in real time, understand device roaming and figure out coverage statistics. This is not a sponsored episode. | LISTEN NOW

EP 085 | NOVEMBER 4, 2025

News Roundup---Naked Satellite Signals, Account Recovery Buddies, Busting Ghost Networks

Did you know college students are snooping on satellite transmissions? On today's Packet Protector news roundup we discuss how university researchers use off-the-shelf equipment to intercept traffic from geostationary satellites and discover that a lot of it is unencrypted. We also dig into the credential hygiene lessons we can learn from a corpus of 183 million hacked email accounts, whether you can trust someone enough to be your new Google account recovery buddy, how Google and Check Point researchers busted a YouTube ghost network distributing malware, and even more infosec news. | LISTEN NOW

EP 105 | NOVEMBER 5, 2025

Campus Network Automation, Powered by Cisco Agentic Workflows (Sponsored)

Cisco Workflows is a new platform that makes network automation easier, smarter, and safer. On today's episode, sponsored by Cisco, we get introduced to Cisco Workflows by Stephen Orr, Distinguished Solutions Engineer; and Reid Butler, Director of Product Management. They break down how Workflows helps you ditch repetitive tasks, roll out changes faster, and plug into tools like Meraki, Catalyst Center, ServiceNow, and more. Reid and Stephen share practical use cases, tips for getting started, and how Cisco uses AI and low-code tools to make automation accessible for everyone — whether you’re a network pro or just automation-curious.| LISTEN NOW

EP 286 | NOVEMBER 5, 2025

Scaling Kubernetes Across Clouds - Identity, DNS, and Security

If you think managing Kubernetes clusters is hard, what about managing Kubernetes clusters across three different public clouds? We dive into the challenges that arises from running multi-cloud Kubernetes workloads. These challenges include workload identity, DNS query resolutions, and security. Here to help us navigate this complexity and offer possible solutions is Goutam Tadi, Staff Software Engineer at Astronomer. | LISTEN NOW

EP 042 | NOVEMBER 6, 2025

Meet MACsec

MACsec is a protocol for encrypting Ethernet frames on a local (though not always local) network. Ethan Banks and Holly Metlitzky have an ELI5 (explain like I'm 5) discussion as to what exactly is MACsec and how it differs from IPsec. They talk about when and whether you need to implement MACsec with all the other modern security protocols out there, and some of the operational challenges that MACsec presents. They also discuss real-world use cases where MACsec would be useful. | LISTEN NOW

EP 187 | NOVEMBER 6, 2025

IPv6 RFC Updates

Today the IPv6 Buzz crew provides updates on the latest in IPv6 standards, RFCs, and best practices. They break down the recent discussions around RFC 6052, explore the options for RFC 8215, and share Nick's spin on the now defunct testipv6.com site. | LISTEN NOW

EP 049 | NOVEMBER 7, 2025

Automated Network Testing and Validation

What does network testing and validation really mean? How do testing and validation fit within an automation workflow? Is it possible to run meaningful tests without coding skills? Dan Wade from BlueAlly answers these questions and offers practical insights into building trust in automation through test environments, using AI for ideation and problem-solving, and personal insight into the big blockers that stall automation programs. | LISTEN NOW

EP 804 | NOVEMBER 7, 2025

How Prisma SASE Builds on Public Clouds for Scale, Resiliency (Sponsored)

Palo Alto Networks made a strategic decision to build its SASE offering on multiple public clouds. On today's sponsored Heavy Networking we discuss why the company made this choice, and its benefits and tradeoffs. We dig into how they design their SASE service to take advantage of cloud scalability and cloud provider backbones, the operational challenges for its DevOps and NetOps teams, how to accelerate performance of security services, data sovereignty issues, and more. | LISTEN NOW