EP 514 | FEBRUARY 18, 2025

Cisco, Juniper Announce New Switches; SolarWinds Goes Private in $4.4 Billion Buyout

This week we discuss Cisco's new DC switches with DPU offloads, Juniper's new campus switches aimed at Wi-Fi 7 deployments, a private equity firm's $4.4 billion acquisition of SolarWinds that takes it off the public market, an IXP win for Nokia, year-end financial results, and more IT news. | LISTEN NOW

SPONSORED | FEBRUARY 18, 2025

Nokia EDA - Stable, Reliable Data Center Automation (Sponsored)

Nokia’s Event-Driven Automation, or EDA, is a network automation platform that aims to help network engineers achieve predictable, error-free operations so you can keep up with all the change tickets coming your way while ensuring the data center is reliable and performant. On today’s Tech Bytes podcast, sponsored by Nokia, we’ll talk about how EDA uses intent-based networking and Kubernetes to build a digital twin of your production network to help you test changes and run pre- and post-checks so you get a rock-solid, reliable data center network. | LISTEN NOW

EP 095 | FEBRUARY 18, 2025

The Journey to a Self-Healing Network: Intelligence, Agents, and Complexity (Sponsored)

Can AI and automation create a truly autonomous network, one that's self-diagnosing and self-healing? Join Vitria CTO and Founder Dale Skeen and industry analyst Charlotte Patrick in this sponsored episode of Heavy Strategy to discuss the challenges--and limitations--of using AI to create autonomous networking. This discussion covers the "intelligence architecture" required to implement automation, and  ranges from the real ROI of AI (it's not what you think!) to effective AI-enabled automation governance. | LISTEN NOW

EP 050 | FEBRUARY 18, 2025

Understanding--and Protecting Yourself From--the Malware Economy

There's an active market for exploits, brokered access to compromised systems, ransomware, bots-as-a-service, and more. On today's Packet Protector we talk with Jake Williams, a security researcher, consultant, and instructor, about the malware economy, how it operates, and the most effective protection strategies. It's not just about EDR; tight control of identity and access management can pay big dividends. We also discuss how much blame vendors should bear for buggy software, whether malware attack vectors are changing, and other topics. | LISTEN NOW

EP 046 | FEBRUARY 18, 2025

The Flipper Zero: A Swiss Army Knife for Tech Enthusiasts

The Flipper Zero is like a Swiss Army knife for wireless tech enthusiasts. Today’s guest, Jason Beshara, is teaching a course on the Flipper Zero device at WLPC Phoenix 2025. He discusses its functions, including its ability to send and receive a variety of radio signals including Bluetooth, NFC, and sub-gigahertz frequencies. The conversation covers practical applications in security and hacking, and lab exercises involving access control, RFID tags, and 3D printing for key duplication. We also discuss the importance of ethical use and responsible experimentation with the device. | LISTEN NOW

EP 265 | FEBRUARY 19, 2025

How Do We Measure Developer Experience?

Developer experience is a hard metric to measure qualitatively. On today’s show, we talk with Kristen Foster-Marks about Developer Experience, or DevEx. We start with the controversial concept of "ghost engineering," which claims many software engineers do not contribute meaningfully to their work. We delve into the validity of this claim, and discuss the scientific literacy and critical thinking required to evaluate such assertions. We also explore the challenges of measuring DevEx and the need for research-backed principles. | LISTEN NOW

EP 169 | FEBRUARY 20, 2025

10 Years of the UK IPv6 Council

IPv6 Buzz welcomes back Veronika McKillop, the founder and President of the UK IPv6 Council, to talk about the council’s formation and achievements in the past ten years. We look at IPv6 adoption in the UK and its challenges, and what the future holds for IPv6. Veronika highlights the need for improved IPv6 education in higher institutions and the council's efforts to bridge this gap. | LISTEN NOW

EP 014 | FEBRUARY 20, 2025

Spanning Tree Part 2 - Root Bridge, Edge Port, Forwarding and Blocking

In part 2 of our spanning tree series, we dive into root bridges, root ports, designated ports, and forwarding and blocked ports. We explain the impact of topology changes on spanning tree and network performance, and discuss how topology changes and convergence events are communicated. Last but not least, we dig into edge ports, along with a few bonus topology examples. | LISTEN NOW

EP 017 | FEBRUARY 21, 2025

Lead People, Manage Machines and Processes

Lead people. Manage machines and processes. That's the the advice from Bill Hunter, today’s guest on Total Network Operations. Bill shares lessons of resilience and adaptability he learned early in his career, including the power of good habits. Bill and Scott discuss how to identify processes that can be automated and when and where to bring humans into the loop. Bill also offers examples of leveraging data and automation for optimizing operations. On the career front, Bill encourages ongoing learning and makes a case for why learning a little Python never hurts. | LISTEN NOW

EP 769 | FEBRUARY 21, 2025

CI/CD Pipelines and Network Automation

Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) is a framework that developers use to help them manage and integrate frequent code changes. As network automation evolves, should network engineers adopt CI/CD? Guest Tony Bourke joins us to talk about CI/CD pipelines: what they are, how they're used, and how they can support network automation efforts. We also talk about the role of Jinja, YAML, Python and Ansible in a network automation environment. | LISTEN NOW