After a busy week of forcing packets to do our nefarious bidding, we found ourselves up against a recording deadline while being less prepared than usual.  To save us from ourselves, at the very last minute we invited Josh O’Brien and Jennifer Huber to pull up a mic and add their weighty thoughts to the networking issues of the day.  Adding to the impromptu nature of this show, we did our first live solicitation of questions from the audience using the Twitterverse, getting instant feedback.  All hail the Intertubes!

• We’re still going to Tech Field Day San Jose and feel perversely compelled to bring it up again.    The good news is that Greg leaks all the Twitter hashtags so that you can easily filter the tweets from your timelines.  😉
• Those crazy kids at Cisco have published details about security vulnerabilities in their wireless LAN controllers (the boxes that, among other things, help you manage a large WAP deployment).  The sinister facts include two denial of service (DoS) vulnerabilities, three privilege escalation vulnerabilities, and two access control list (ACL) bypass vulnerabilities.  Read all about it.
• Stuart Howlette is working from his shed on making a highly prized and outrageously expensive Nokia IP330 appliance into a JUNOS router. You can too, with Olive!
• Stretch over at packetlife.net continues to build out his community lab with the help of donations, the latest addition being a Cisco Catalyst 3560.
• Tony Brown e-mails the podcast to ask about MPLS vs. VPLS.  To layer 3, or not to layer 3, that is question! We blurt out with heartfelt personal experiences which eventually devolves into gratuitous carrier bashing.  The secret is to bang the rocks together, guys…
• Ralph live-tweeted to ask what vendors the Pushers would consider if we were deploying 10G ethernet in our data centers.  Among the usual suspects (Cisco Nexus, Arista, HP, etc.), Josh points out the often overlooked Cisco Catalyst 4900M.
• Bri from Twitter asks us the age-old question about EIGRP vs. OSPF — which one is right? Some of us say we mostly don’t care, but Greg makes the excellent point that open standards are good, and proprietary is bad.  Ergo, OSPF is almost always the right answer.  Hmm…
• We talk about firewalling & IPS inside the data center because of a question from Fernando, including a bit about transparent (layer 2) firewalls.
• The Pushers proclaim the mighty virtue of autonegotiation in gigabit ethernet networks, castigating the heretics who dare to manually set speed and duplex in anything other than the most dire of circumstances.  Greg had explained himself on this point in a blog post earlier this year.

Feedback

Follow the Packet Pushers on Twitter (@packetpushers | Greg  @etherealmind |  Dan  @rovingengineer |  Ethan  @ecbanks), and send your queries & comments about the show to  [email protected].  We want to hear from you!