Heavy Networking

Fortinet is a security vendor most of you have heard of. But if all you think of when you hear the name “Fortinet” is firewalls, well yeah, but you should think more broadly. On today's sponsored Heavy Networking we're going after the work-from-anywhere challenge with Fortinet’s Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) tech, all of which is baked into FortiOS. If you’re running a FortiGate, you’ve got these capabilities already.

Today’s Heavy Networking podcast explores the concept of NetDevOps with sponsor Itential. The idea behind NetDevOps is to advance your network to the point where it’s self-service; that is, the network you operate can be consumed the way public cloud services are consumed. Our guest is Itential co-founder & CTO Chris Wade.

On today’s Heavy Networking we get into IPv6 essentials for network engineers, including how to incorporate IPv6 support in upcoming projects, how IPv6 affects NAT and subnetting, what the heck Happy Eyeballs and nibble boundaries are, and why you should approach IPv6 with a mindset of abundance not scarcity.

You know all those Apple and other IoT devices connected to your wireless network? Lots of them run apps that discover services on your network via multicast DNS (mDNS). All of that mDNS traffic can have a significant impact on your WLAN’s performance. On today's Heavy Networking we talk with guest Bryan Ward who has actually measured the impact of mDNS on a production wireless network to see what would happen if he let mDNS traffic run wild.

Lots of folks suffer from impostor syndrome. Tech is complex--how could you know what you’re doing? And yet, many of us are responsible for incredibly complex IT systems. Fake it ‘til you make it, right? To handle the cognitive dissonance of impostor syndrome, we overcompensate. In doing so, we pay a personal price. Today's Heavy Networking guest is Matt Vitale. He's here to share what he's learned about coping with and overcoming imposter syndrome.

On today's Heavy Networking we sub in a podcast from our Heavy Strategy channel. Greg Ferro from the Packet Pushers and Johna Till Johnson, CEO of Nemertes Research, discuss the impacts of ChatGPT and AI on the technology workspace, including whether human workers can partner with these tools to increase productivity and improve technology experiences. They don't have answers, but they do have unanswered questions.

On today’s Heavy Networking I talk with two people who have built and are running Hachyderm, a Mastodon instance which orients itself towards technical-minded folks. What started as a cool project in the basement suddenly grew to tens of thousands of users. I talk with Hachyderm's founders on how they scaled, problems they encountered, how they solved problems, and how they grappled with technical and human challenges.

On today's Heavy Networking, sponsor Graphaint is here to discuss how it's rethinking SD-WAN using a Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) model to help customers consume WAN connectivity instead of setting up and operating a WAN for themselves. Graphiant combines SD-WAN mainstays such as multiple connection options and traffic policies based on applications and performance, without the operational overhead of SD-WAN tunnels. We dive into the how and why in this episode.

On Heavy Networking today we look at a home lab running VMware products including NSX, as well as infrastructure-as-code products Terraform, Packer, and Ansible. These use cases create a different hardware demand than virtualized network operating system images. Guest Maarten Van Driessen explains it all, including how he saves money on lab gear.

In today’s Heavy Networking show with sponsor Broadcom we go deep into network management and Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM). At its heart, DEM is about understanding the user experience of the network. Network monitoring and management products that incorporate user experience, such as Broadcom's DX NetOps, can provide visibility into network and application performance to help inform troubleshooting efforts and speed resolution.