Packet Pushers - Fat Pipe

Take a Network Break!  We start with a relative path traversal vulnerability in Fortinet’s FortiWeb.  We’ll move on to an acquisition by Palo Alto Networks, another hiccup from our friends at Cloudflare, some AI announcements by Itential and Gluware, and finish with first quarter 2026 fiscal results from Palo Alto Networks. AdSpot Sponsor: Itential  ... Read more »

Today Scott interviews Andy Lapteff. He opens up about his non-linear career path, starting from a working class background and his physical jobs in telecom to becoming a senior product marketing manager and podcaster. Join us as Andy shares candid stories of how he developed his resilience and the heartwarming origin story for the Art... Read more »

Unit testing is a software development practice for checking that an individual component of code works before integrating that unit with other components in a larger program. A new open source project called Network Unit Testing System, or NUTS, brings the same concept to network automation. The big idea is that by incorporating unit tests into... Read more »

In today’s chat, Holly and Ethan consider a question from listener Douglas who asks, “How do you approach designing a network for high availability and redundancy?” They start by defining differences between redundancy and high availability, and talk about Holly’s experience with her own customers. Then they share examples of how to achieve redundancy in... Read more »

Ever wonder what it takes to level up your career in data science? Senior Data Scientist Darya Petrashka joins Ned and Kyler to share her personal journey from management and linguistics into data science, the real difference between a junior and a senior role, and helps us get under the “data science umbrella” to see... Read more »

Just what’s inside that commercial software you bought? Does it contain open-source components, NPM packages, or other third-party code? How could you find out? The answer is a Software Bill of Materials, or SBOM, a machine-readable inventory of a finished piece of software. Why should you care about SBOMs? Our guest, Natalie Somersall, is here... Read more »

Take a Network Break! Red Hat Samba server has a remote command execution vulnerability, and we cover some follow-up on fusion as a viable energy source (still a work in progress). On the news front, we search for signs in SoftBank’s sale of its Nividia stake, Mplify debuts a new certificate on carrier Ethernet for... Read more »

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... Read more »

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... Read more »

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... Read more »

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, a former network engineer with AWS... Read more »

Take a Network Break! We start with a critical vulnerability in Cisco’s Unified Contact Center Express. On the news front it’s a Cisco triple play: the company brings AI to professional services and tech support with Cisco IQ, debuts converged infrastructure for the AI edge, and launches a new cert geared for running AI data... Read more »

How do you architect a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) to provide critical security services to millions of endpoints distributed across the planet? How do you build such a service for scale, performance, and resiliency? One option is to build your own PoPs or use colocation facilities, run your own infrastructure stack, and connect everything... Read more »

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... Read more »

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... Read more »

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... Read more »

Did you know college students are snooping on satellite transmissions? On today’s news roundup we discuss new research in which university investigators 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... Read more »

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... Read more »

Take a Network Break! We start with some educational content on Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, and sound the alarm about a sandbox escape affecting the Firefox browser. On the news front, a DNS issue triggers a major Azure outage that affected numerous services and caused problems around the globe, Palo Alto Networks announces enhancements to... Read more »

On today’s show, sponsored by Itential, we talk about automation in the real world. Guest Jesse Ford is an automation architect at Itential. We talk about his career journey, how he got into network automation, how he decides which is the best tool for a job, and why tool diversity isn’t the same as chaos.... Read more »