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  • Human Infrastructure 459: Broadcast Storms, Diagnosing a Home Network, and More

Human Infrastructure 459: Broadcast Storms, Diagnosing a Home Network, and More

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Drew Conry-Murray & Ethan Banks
August 13, 2026

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

Jeffrey Wilson shares an outage story from his career. The problem was a server doing exactly what is was designed to do. It’s a good story, and Jeffrey offers some takeaways that might help you in a similar situation. - Drew 

Keith Parsons recently launched the WLAN Pros Toolbox, a free multipurpose app with lots of tools (173 in fact) to help wireless network engineers do their jobs. (You can hear Keith talk about it on this episode of his Heavy Wireless podcast.)

Ali was one of the testers of the toolbox before it was released. This post covers his favorite apps in the toolbox, including screenshots so you can see what they look like. Of course, you can also just get it for yourself because it’s free. - Drew 

Gabor put his networking and AI skills to work to figure out why a streaming service was having such poor performance on his home network. It includes a packet capture, routing configs, and using Claude Code to (eventually) find the culprit.  - Drew 

Pat Allen offers some concrete ways that team leads and middle managers can do to minimize the impacts of dysfunction at higher layers of the organization. He also talks about how to deal with the frustrations that come from dysfunction, how to operate within such an environment, and how to recognize when it’s no longer tolerable. Lots of good stuff here. - Drew 

MORE BLOGS

Missed Meter Circuit? Watch the sessions on demand

This summer, Meter Circuit convened network engineers, IT leaders, and our partners to discuss the future of enterprise networking.

Now you can catch all of the sessions online, diving into:

  • How IT teams see the evolution of enterprise networking

  • Meter’s full-stack approach to hardware, software, ISP, and operations

  • How customers drive impact with reliable, secure networks

Catch up now on the technical sessions and real-world lessons shaping enterprise network decisions.

TECH NEWS 📣

This is an interesting story about using cryptographic signatures to authenticate where news stories are coming from. It’s being used in Japan, which has experienced lots of fake news generated by imposter news sites being spread on social media, especially during disasters such as earthquakes. The mechanism for the cryptographic signatures comes from an open-source project in Japan called Originator Profile. Note that the project doesn’t assert whether a news item is true or not, just that it came from an authenticated publication. - Drew  

The Register reports that Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins anticipates customers will upgrade network devices that are no longer supported by the vendor to avoid being pwned by AI models such as Mythos. It’s not clear how much a security-driven equipment refresh will be reflected in the bottom line, but what CEO would turn away a Mythos-driven windfall? - Drew 

MORE NEWS

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

Zeek is an open source security tool for passive monitoring of network traffic. If you’re in the Bay Area, you can attend a free, two-day workshop on how to use Zeek and get more out of it. The workshop is being held at the David Brower Center in Berkeley, CA on September 10 and 11. All levels of Zeek experience are welcome.

According to the organizers, here’s what you’ll get:

“Day 1 brings real-world operational lessons from Zeek creator Vern Paxson, tech lead Christian Kreibich, and practitioners from NERSC, ESnet, Corelight, and the Black Hat NOC. Day 2 shifts into a hands-on training session covering cluster setup and custom detection scripting.”

Did I mention the workshop is free? Register here. - Drew

CYBR.SEC.CON, September 15-16, 2026

CYBR.SEC.CON brings together cybersecurity leaders, practitioners, researchers, and innovators for two days of education, networking, and community at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston on September 15 - 16, 2026.

See the full agenda and speaker lineup here.

Packet Pushers is a media sponsor and Packet Protector podcast hosts Drew Conry-Murray and Jennifer “JJ” Jabbusch will be live on site. Find them in the Broadcast Alley to say hello and grab an exclusive Packet Protector fridge magnet and other fun swag.

Ready to register? You can save 15% off the already-reasonable ticket price with the code CSCPacketPushers-26

UPCOMING LIVE EVENTS 🍕🍻

A curated list of near-future meatspace events of interest to network engineers. Sometimes a Packet Pusher or two will be there (noted below).

Subscribe to events.packetpushers.net in your calendar software.

AUGUST 2026

(MN)NUG | Summer Event 2026 (USNUA)
19 August | St. Paul, MN

SEPTEMBER 2026

(KY)NUG Lexinton Fall Event (USNUA)
1 September | Lexington, KY

NLNAM Meetup 3 | NL Network Automation Meetup
9 September | Utrecht, Netherlands

Wi-Co Manchester
9 - 10 September | Manchester, UK

2026 Summer Social | TORNOG
10 September | Toronto, Canada

Zeek Workshop
10 - 11 September | Berkeley, California

Cybr.Sec.Con
15 - 16 September | Houston, Texas (Drew and JJ will be there!)

NetBrain Live 2026
22 - 24 September | Boston, MA

(MO)NUG | Missouri Networking User Group (USNUA)
23 September | St. Louis, Missouri

Wi-Co Cleveland
24 September | Cleveland, OH

Higher Education NETCOMM Workshop 2026
29 September | Denver, CO

OCTOBER 2026

Wi-Co Montreal
7 October | Pointe-Claire, QC

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

This post delves into VXLANsec as an option to encrypt traffic. It uses MACsec for the encryption, but unlike traditional MACsec, there’s no requirement for every switch in a hop-by-hop path to support it. Instead, only VTEPs participating in an overlay have to support it. HPE Juniper’s QFX5130-48CM now supports VXLANsec. The post also provides a configuration overview and additional details. - Drew  

Allegro Packets makes devices for network analysis and troubleshooting. The company just announced new capabilities for collecting network traffic on endpoint devices and in the cloud in the 4.7 release of its software. From the press release: “...business-critical traffic has increasingly moved outside the infrastructure that traditional monitoring tools were built to watch. Allegro Packets built the Edge Visibility Agent and Cloud Edition to close that gap without asking network teams to give up the packet-level fidelity they rely on for root-cause analysis.” - Drew 

Cloudflare can now manage a robots.txt file on behalf of customers that tells AI Web crawlers which content can and can’t be crawled for use cases such as training or tuning AI models.  Crawlers don’t have to honor this signal, so Cloudflare also offers a service that can enforce blocking. - Drew 

Anthropic’s Claude recently announced a new capability to help compliance and security teams enforce DLP policies on Claude prompts and tool calls. These inference hooks rely on an existing DLP server to decide on a block or allow. From the blog: “Until today, native inline enforcement was limited to Claude Code's client-side hooks. Inference hooks closes the gap with a single enforcement layer that covers every Claude Enterprise surface without separate integration work or agent per product.” - Drew 

MORE INDUSTRY NOISES

DYSTOPIA IRL 🐙

TOO MANY LINKS WOULD NEVER BE ENOUGH 🐳

LAST LAUGH 😆

Shared by Anton on the Packet Pushers Community Slack, which you’re welcome to join!