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 Jason Gooley, Wendell Odom, Tom, and Russ as we discuss the most recent updates to the CCNA, the way updates to the program are changing, and Jason's and Wendell's updated book on the...

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 get out there and publish.   https://media.blubrry.com/hedge/content.blubrry.com/hedge/hedge-222.mp3   download

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 there in changing protocols to save energy? George Michaelson joins us from Australia to discuss energy awareness in protocols.   https://media.blubrry.com/hedge/content.blubrry.com/hedge/hedge-221.mp3   download

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 quickly than you can buy hardware and get it running? Do you really need to be able to spin capacity down without leaving any hardware behind? Is cloud really the best use of your team's time and talent? David Heinemeier Hansson joins Tom and Russ to talk about the economics and uses...

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 the right goals? https://media.blubrry.com/hedge/content.blubrry.com/hedge/hedge-219.mp3 download>

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. Justin Wilson joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss why the DFZ might need to be expanded to longer prefix lengths, and the tradeoffs involved in doing...

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 talk about BGP security in the wild. https://media.blubrry.com/hedge/content.blubrry.com/hedge/hedge-218.mp3 download

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 idea and ended up building an automation system that does cross vendor boundaries within a larger discussion about automation and APIs. https://media.blubrry.com/hedge/content.blubrry.com/hedge/hedge-216.mp3 download

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 through a selection of quotes from an engineering book published in 1911. This time, we find there are some things to agree with, but also some to disagree with. https://media.blubrry.com/hedge/content.blubrry.com/hedge/hedge-215.mp3

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 the Hedge, Krzysztof Wróbel and Maciej Rabęda join Russ and Tom to talk about hardware offloading. https://media.blubrry.com/hedge/content.blubrry.com/hedge/kedge-214.mp3 download You can find out more about...

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 and Russ White to talk about this new tool, its capabilities, and the importance of network configuration...

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 just the term? Listen in as Chris Romeo joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to talk about the origin, meaning, and modern uselessness of the term "shift left."   https://media.blubrry.com/hedge/content.blubrry.com/hedge/hedge-212.mp3   download

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, Eyvonne, and Russ discuss a recent paper from the Communications of the ACM, 10 Things Software Developers Should Learn about Learning.   https://media.blubrry.com/hedge/content.blubrry.com/hedge/hedge-211.mp3   download   transcript (machine...

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 Russ to talk about the ins and outs of technical publishing. We are planning a part 2 of this in a few months to cover things we left on the table for later...

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 a new book on IoT architecture, joins Tom and Russ for this episode of the Hedge. https://media.blubrry.com/hedge/content.blubrry.com/hedge/hedge-208.mp3

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 corner of information technology today.   https://media.blubrry.com/hedge/content.blubrry.com/hedge/hedge-207.mp3   download

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 of radical changes, you can apply self-discipline to make your little part of the world a better place by keeping yourself sane, fit, and well-rested.   https://media.blubrry.com/hedge/content.blubrry.com/hedge/hedge-206.mp3   download   transcript

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 to see how advice given to engineering students over 100 years ago holds up for today. Have engineering challenges, and the engineering life, changed all that much? What kinds of advice stand the test of time, what kinds do...

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 episode 203. https://media.blubrry.com/hedge/content.blubrry.com/hedge/hedge-204.mp3 download rough transcript

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 as Hedge episode 204. https://media.blubrry.com/hedge/content.blubrry.com/hedge/hedge-203.mp3 download transcript

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 crucial to building and operating networks connected to the global Internet. George Michaelson joins Toms and Russ to talk about Internet governance—including contrary views of where things should be versus where they...