In the United States, the National Telecommunications and Infrastructure Administration manages spectrum and researches the current state of Internet connectivity for policy makers. Henning Schulzrinne joins Tom and Russ to discuss the role of the NTIA, spectrum management, and broadband management.

Trends in the global BGP table–the Default Free Zone (DFZ) table–can tell us a lot about the state of the global Internet. Is the Internet growing? Is IPv6 growing, or are we still in a world of “all things IPv4?” Geoff Huston joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to review the state of the routing table from 2024.

We often try to “institutionalize” things that work into repeatable processes—and most of the time, it doesn’t work. The process ends up becoming unwieldy, eventually failing to prevent failures and stifling innovation. How can we get out of this rut? Differentiating between architecture and process. Far too many IT shops try to replace architecture with process. Our second topic for this episode is the destructive lies of the tool trope. Tools are not “neutral,” they impact the way we think and work. A primary example of a tool that can often reshape our thinking and doing in very negative ways is … the process.

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We often think of network automation as a configuration tool, but automation can also be used for one-off, integration, and even continuous testing. Dan Wade joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to talk about pyATS and the concept of automated testing. To find out more about pyATS, check here.

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Every recruiter and hiring manager wants people with five years of experience, but you cannot get experience without being hired into a position. How can you break this conundrum? Daniel Dib joins Tom and Russ to talk about how folks just coming into IT, or even those with lots of experience who are trying to shift their focus, can gain experience.

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Richard Wexelblat published an article in 1980 titled: “The consequences of one’s first programming language.” We’ve all seen C code written like Python, or Python code written like C, so it’s obvious a coder’s first language has a long lasting effect on their style. What about network engineers? Are there times and places where the first of anything a network engineers encounters has a long lasting impact on the way they think and work? In this roundtable, Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ consider different ways this might apply to network engineering.

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One of the various attack surfaces in encryption is insuring the certificates used to share the initial set of private keys are not somehow replaced by an attacker. In systems where a single server or source is used to get the initial certificates, however, it is fairly easy for an attacker to hijack the certificate distribution process.

Henry Birge-Lee joins us on this episode of the Hedge to talk about extensions to existing certificate systems where a certificate is pulled from more than one source. You can find his article here.

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One of the big questions about IPv6 is: “Should you use /64’s for subnets?” Tom Coffeen joins Eyvonne Sharp, Rick Graziani, and Russ as we discuss the various questions surrounding IPv6 addressing, planning, waste, and … should you /64?

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In this episode of the Hedge, Eyvonne, Tom, and Russ talk about whether Intel will survive, centralization and industrial spying, and why you need to go touch grass and read a book.

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Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) are one of the key centers of Internet infrastructure. How do IXPs work together to build this critical infrastructure? Through ICP associations, such as the African IXP Association. Ricardo Simba joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to talk about a recent meeting of the African IXP Association.