The Fat Pipe - Most Popular Packet Pushers Pods

There’s lots of juicy stories in our monthly security news roundup. The Scattered Spider hacking group makes effective use of social engineering to target MSPs, Microsoft pushes for better Windows resiliency by rethinking kernel access policies for third-party endpoint security software, and the US Justice Department files indictments against alleged operators of laptop farms that... Read more »

Take a Network Break! We start with listener follow-up on Arista market share in the enterprise, and then sound the alarm about a remote code execution vulnerability in Adobe Experience Manager. On the news front, Arista buys VeloCloud to charge into the SD-WAN market, CoreWeave acquires a cryptominer to get access to GPUs and electricity... Read more »

Cisco recently announced a major evolution to its certification roadmap: starting February 2026, the popular DevNet certifications will transition to a brand-new Automation track. Joining us today is Francois Caen, Product Manager at Cisco, also an expert in network automation and a recognized voice in the Cisco Learning and Certification Community. We talk with Francois... Read more »

Quantum computing is here, and it’s being used for more than cracking encryption. On today’s Packet Protector we get a primer on quantum, how it differs from classical computing, its applications for difficult computing problems, why quantum will be the death of blockchain, and how to think about quantum risks. Our guest, Johna Johnson, is... Read more »

Take a Network Break! HPE and Juniper have settled with the US Department of Justice, allowing HPE’s $14 billion purchase to move forward. However, as part of the deal, Juniper must grant a full license to its AI Ops for Mist source code to one, or perhaps two, companies via an auction to be overseen... Read more »

SNMP is still widely used in today’s networks. But modern telemetry and network observability are bringing changes to network monitoring. Today’s Heavy Networking is a roundtable discussion about alternatives to SNMP and real-world use cases for those alternatives. This episode was inspired by a request from listener Nikolay. He says… While telemetry (gRPC, etc.) is... Read more »

On today’s show we talk about NetDevOps and AI Ops with Greg Freeman, VP of Network and Customer Transformation at Lumen. Greg spearheads network automation, orchestration ,and AI strategy, guiding the highest technical tier in operations and championing NetDevOps methodologies. We talk about the people and work culture that’s influenced the development of automation and... Read more »

By popular request (and now that we have some other background topics covered) we start our series on the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) routing protocol. We kick off the series with OSPF basics including Link State Advertisements, Link State Database, and other related essentials. We’ll explore additional OSPF topics over subsequent episodes. This week’s... Read more »

Dan Barr, a Senior Technical Marketing Engineer at StackLock, dives into the intricacies of the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open-source tool for AI integration. He discusses the evolution from basic chatbots to sophisticated AI agents and the importance of governance in these systems. Security challenges in deploying MCP servers are also highlighted, along with ToolHive's innovative solutions for managing credentials and authorizations. The conversation touches on how OAuth is transforming machine identities and the need for best practices in AI management.

Take a Network Break! Our Red Alert is a remote code execution vulnerability in Roundcube. On the news front, HPE announces GreenLake Intelligence, which will bring agentic AI capabilities to the HPE portfolio, Pure Storage brings cloud-like operations for on-prem storage, and Juniper Networks adds predictive analytics to its data center ops platform. Weka rolls... Read more »