Take a Network Break! We close out 2025 with a look back at some of the stories and trends that captured our attention this year. We start with the top five vendors with the worst track records in 2025 for zero-days in critical enterprise infrastructure. On the news front, we discuss the insanity of the... Read more »
Is the ideal IT employee just leaving college or a veteran with years of experience? Russ White joins Ethan Banks and Drew Conry-Murray to discuss the complexities of this question. Younger professionals just out of college are more willing to work longer hours or unpopular shifts, learn new tools and skills, and take risks. Older... Read more »
AJ Murray joins Kevin and Alexis to share his unique journey into tech, pivoting away from aviation maintenance into networking. Together they explore the importance of person-to-person networking and building a community in order to be successful. They also talk about the reality of burnout, which ultimately led AJ to step away from his podcast.... Read more »
As AI tools and agentic AI become part of how applications are developed, delivered, and managed, application performance monitoring and observability have to adapt. Ned Bellavance sits down with Drew Flowers and Jacob Yackenovich from IBM Instana about where these fields sit today, and the potential impacts of AI. They detail the challenges of application... Read more »
Take a Network Break! Our Red Alert calls out a dangerous vulnerability in the popular open-source React library. On the news front, HPE decides on a “both and” strategy for its two wireless portfolios and rolls out an option to let customers pick and choose among cross-platform features in Mist and Aruba Networking Central through... Read more »
RG Nets builds gateways and centralized-authentication appliances to help manage and automate revenue-generating networks. On today’s Tech Bytes, we talk with RG Nets founder Simon Lok. But instead of talking about RG Nets, we delve into DPUs. This specialized hardware, which provides additional compute for network devices, has the potential to move from a niche... Read more »
Andy Lapteff once considered himself a ‘CLI lifer.’ As a network engineer he wasn’t interested in Python. He didn’t want to learn to code. He had no desire to embrace any of the developer-like processes and tools creeping into the profession, particularly around network automation. That’s changed. On today’s Heavy Networking, Andy shares the professional,... Read more »
The newly published RFC 9898 is the discussion of today’s podcast. The IPv6 Buzz crew explore the complexities of neighbor discovery and review solutions for both operators and architects. They share how this RFC serves as a single, detailed resource to improve your understanding of neighbor discovery and to reduce the potential attack surface in... Read more »
Ned and Kyler sit down with Deana Solis, a freelance FinOps engineer and mentor. They discuss the undervalued skills of communication, look at the inherent biases and misplaced confidence of AI models, and offer guidance for those starting their careers. Deana also talks about her journey to discover the intersection of technology, career, and finding... Read more »
Take a Network Break! We start with listener follow-up on Fortinet’s vulnerability numbering, and sound a red alert about an authentication bypass vulnerability in ASUS’s AiCloud service. AWS and Google announce a joint cross-cloud interconnect offering (other cloud providers are invited to play), Microsoft and Ciena pitch a new design to boost optical network resiliency,... Read more »
Itential has announced FlowAI, a new offering that brings agentic AI to Itential’s network automation platform. On today’s Tech Bytes podcast Ethan Banks talks with Peter Sprygada, Chief Architect at Itential, about how FlowAI works, its components, and how Itential uses the Model Context Protocol (MCP). They also dig into how FlowAI supports AI-driven orchestration... Read more »
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 »
A lot of network monitoring tools allow you to say, “It’s not the network,” but a more useful tool would not only tell you that it’s not the network, but also what the problem actually is. Today our guest is Brandon Hale, CTO at IBM SevOne. He is here to give us an overview of... 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 »
What does it take for an entire country to adopt IPv6? Our guest today is Tenanoia (Noia) Simona, CEO of Tuvalu Telecommunications Corporation, the country’s sole telecommunications provider. She’s here to walk us through the difficulties of connecting the many islands of Tuvalu and their journey to achieving one of the world’s highest IPv6 adoption... 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 »
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 »
If you’re building, testing, or using AI agents and services, how can you get network visibility into, and ensure performance of, these tools? On today’s Tech Bytes podcast, we talk with sponsor Cisco ThousandEyes about how to monitor and measure performance of AI agents, AI models and services, and Model Context Protocol servers. We’ll get... 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 »
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