By Russ White
culture eats technology for breakfast
If you’ve ever wondered what the process of creating and publishing a book is like, listen in as Aninda joins Tom and Russ to discuss the trials and rewards of publishing his first book, Deploying Juniper Data Centers with EVPN...
We often think of decoupling, or modularization in network engineering speak, as a primary tool for scaling networks, but it also one of the best tools network engineers have to increase security. In this roundtable, Eyvonne, Tom, and Russ discuss...
You will probably be laid off at least once in your career–we no longer live a world of “permanent positions,” or even a world where people are in complete control of their “work destiny.” It’s important, then, to prepare to...
What is QUIC? Where did it come from? Why has it been successfully deployed where so many other protocols have either taken forever or flat-out failed? George Michaelson (of APNIC fame) joins Tom Ammon and Russ White on this episode...
Miscommunication between techies and business leaders are often caused by misunderstanding. Listen in as Eyvonne, Tom, and Russ discuss these misunderstandings and how we can address them. https://media.blubrry.com/hedge/content.blubrry.com/hedge/hedge-228.mp3 download
Europe and the United States are completely different landscapes of Internet service providers. Which provides better service for customers, and which direction should these different markets go? Luke Kehoe joins Tom Ammon, Eyvonne Sharp, and Russ White to discuss the...
Alexis Bertholf joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss how we can make network engineering cool again—and to talk about how we got into network engineering. https://media.blubrry.com/hedge/content.blubrry.com/hedge/hedge-226.mp3 download
The CCNA has a long history as an important certification for network engineers. While the CCST has been created by Cisco “below” the CCNA, or as a different starting point, many network engineers begin their career with the CCNA. Join...
Is Open Source Software (OSS) a market failure? What does OSS add to the market that cannot be accomplished in other ways? What happened to the F (Free)? Join us for this roundtable episode of the Hedge. https://media.blubrry.com/hedge/content.blubrry.com/hedge/hedge-224.mp3 download
Listen in as Geoff Huston, Tom, and Russ discuss how the IETF, governments, and political movements interact when creating standards and guiding the future of the Internet. https://media.blubrry.com/hedge/content.blubrry.com/hedge/hedge-223.mp3 download
Eric Chou joins Tom and Russ to talk about the importance of creating content, and the many tools and ideas you can use to get out there and publish. You’ve heard us talk about this a lot–now it’s time to...
A lot of people are spending time thinking about how to make transport and control plane protocols more energy efficient. Is this effort worth it? What amount of power are we really like to save, and what downside potential is...
Cloud services are all the rage right now, but are they worth it? There are many aspects to the question, and the answer is almost always going to be “it depends.” Do you really need to spin up capacity more...
We’ve been talking about many of the same things in networking since the late 1980s–autonomous, self-driving, autonomic, etc.–and yet … those things all still seem like some sort of Jetson’s cartoon episode. Why aren’t we there yet? Are these even...
Most providers will only accept a /24 or shorter IPv4 route because routers have always had limited amounts of forwarding table space. In fact, many hardware and software IPv4 forwarding implementations are optimized for a /24 or shorter prefix length....
We hear a lot about BGP security incidents–but what is really going on? How often do these happen, and how much damage do they do? Doug Madory, who monitors these things for Kentik, joins Russ White and Tom Ammon to...
One thing we often hear about automation is that its hard because there are so many different interfaces. On this episode of the Hedge, Daniel Teycheney joins Ethan Banks and Russ White to discuss how they started from a simple...
Reading people from the past can sometimes show us where today’s blind spots are–but sometimes we can just find the blind spots of the people who lived then. In this episode of the Hedge, Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ finish going...
Network operators increasingly rely on generic hosts, rather than specialized routers (appliances) to forward traffic. Much of the performance on hosts relies on offloading packets switching and processing to specialized hardware on the network interface card. In this episode of...
Network configuration analysis has always been the domain of commercial-grade software. Batfish changes all that with an open source, community-supported tool that can find errors and guarantees the correctness of planned or current network configurations. Ratul Mahajan joins Tom Ammon...
How many times have you heard you should “shift left” in the last few years? What does “shift left” even mean? Even if it had meaning once, does it still have any meaning today? Should we abandon the concept, or...
How much have you thought about the way you learn–or how to effectively teach beginners? There is a surprising amount of research into how humans learn, and how best to create material to teach them. In this roundtable episode, Tom,...
Have you ever thought about publishing a book or recording a professional video? It’s not as simple as proposing an idea, doing the work, and becoming famous (or infamous, as the case might be). Eric Chou joins Rick Graziani and...
User interface design is notoriously bad for networking gear–but why, and what can we do about it? Frank Seesink joins Tom and Russ to talk about user interface stupidity. https://media.blubrry.com/hedge/content.blubrry.com/hedge/hedge-209.mp3 download
The Internet of Things (IoT) has been brewing for many years–but how do all these new devices impact your network? Are there new concepts and architectures you need to learn to get a handle on IoT? Jasbir Singh, author of...
What does it mean to be a network engineer in today’s world of information technology? Phil Gervasi joins Tom and Russ to discuss the ins and outs of network engineering, and what it’s really like to be in this small...
As we reach the end of what has been a hard two-year stretch for what seems like the entire world, Ethan Banks joins Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ to talk about the importance of taking care of yourself. In the midst...
For this month’s roundtable, Eyvonne, Tom, and I return to Addresses to Engineering Students by Harrington and Waddell. This book, published in 1912, is a “product of its time,” and hence deserves some trigger warnings. But it is also interesting...
Terry Slattery joins Tom and Russ to continue the conversation on network automation—and why networks are not as automated as they should be. This is part one of a two-part series; the first part of this conversation was posted as...
Terry Slattery joins Tom and Russ to continue the conversation on network automation—and why networks are not as automated as they should be. This is part one of a two-part series; the second part will be published in two weeks...
How is the Internet governed? Who sets the rules for the Internet, civil society, and government control? How much input should techies have, and how much should government control things? These are questions we don’t often ask, and yet are...
It’s time to gather round the hedge and discuss whatever Eyvonne, Tom, and Russ find interesting! In this episode we discuss business logic vulnerabilities, and how we often forget to think outside the box to understand the attack surfaces that...
We’ve been on a long streak of discussions about automation, why it works, why it isn’t working, and what the networking industry can do about it. For this episode, we’re joined by the indubitable Ethan Banks. If you don’t think...
Automation is a big topic–folks had a lot of feedback on our first couple of Hedge episodes on the topic. We return to automation in this episode of the Hedge with Carl Buchmann to discuss one effort at unifying automation...
Automation is a bit of theme recently on the Hedge. In this episode we’re joined by Wim Henderickx to talk about the Linux Foundation Nephio project, which adapts Kubernetes management into a cloud native network management platform. This new take...
It’s time for the October Roundtable! This month Eyvonne, Tom, and Russ are reading quotes from an engineering book published in 1911 and reacting to them. How much has engineering changed? How much has engineering stayed the same? How well...
Ethernet is the technology used to move most of the world’s data at the physical layer. What has been going on for the last few years in Ethernet, and what is coming? Peter Jones joins Tom Ammon and Russ White...
DDoS attacks still play a major role in the global Internet, costing organizations tens (or hundreds) or millions of dollars each year. What are the current and future trends in DDoS attacks? Barry Greene, a global expert in DDoS mitigation,...
Year after year network engineering media, vendors, and influencers talk about the importance of network automation—and yet according to surveys, most network operators still have not automated their network operations. In this episode of the Hedge, part 2 of 2,...
Year after year network engineering media, vendors, and influencers talk about the importance of network automation—and yet according to surveys, most network operators still have not automated their network operations. In this episode of the Hedge, part 1 of 2,...
Addiction and addiction recovery are not a “normal” Hedge topic, but addiction afflicts many people in Information Technology. We’re all “hard driven” types, who feel failure keenly, and we tend to spend more time working than is probably healthy for...
While power is crucial for data centers, it’s also something network engineers don’t talk about a lot. In this episode of the Hedge, Sarah Martin from HED Design joins us to talk about the history, current state, and future of...
What impact would Electromagnetic Pulses (EMP) from a large-scale sunspot have in the modern world? One this episode of the Hedge, Ulrich Speidel and Jaap Akkerhuis join George Michaelson and Russ White to discuss space weather and its impact on...
When network engineers think of a data center, we think of fabrics and routers and switches. There is a lot more to a data center, though—there is power, building construction, environmentals, and a lot of others. What possible jobs are...
It’s the last show of the month, which means it is time for a roundtable! Today we are discussing three news stories, including Amazon’s Sidewalk Labs, a court case in California involving Cisco and the Great Firewall of China, and...
Buffer bloat causes permanent delay at multiple points along the path between a server and client—but it is hard to measure and resolve. Bjørn Teigen joins Tom and Russ on this episode of the Hedge to discuss the problem, solutions...
The idea of a root of trust is somewhat foreign to network engineers—what is it, and why would it be important? Michael and Marcus from Hedgehog join Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss how hardware roots of trust work,...
Computers only have a history stretching back some 60 or 70 years—and yet much of that history has already been lost in this mist of time. Are we focusing so deeply on the future that we have forgotten our past?...
It’s roundtable time at the Hedge! This month, Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ kick off the conversation talking about the value (and some dangers) of open source software. Fake Agile is up next—what does it really mean to be agile, and...
What’s next for network engineering? While we normally think of answers to this question in terms of technology, Mike Bushong joins this episode of the Hedge to argue the future is in operations—and operational excellence. Join Mike, Tom, and Russ...
