32 - Open Source Pizza Boxes in the DC

In this episode, we interview Christos Hassis, wireless consulting engineer at Cisco Poland. He tells us about his Wi-Fi site survey engagements and in particular an engagement in a car factory where all the data looked good on the surface and previous engineer said there was no problem but the customer begged to differ. He developped a custom MCP server to discuss with his site survey results, find out the problem and explain the improvement plan to the customer.

In this episode Marcin, leader of the ThinkCubator in Krakow, describes a creative tech space at Cisco where people learn electronics, 3D printing and hardware prototyping.The space includes soldering stations (training required), measurement tools, power supplies, modules, cables and many 3D printers. Projects range from air-quality sensors and badge readers to ruggedized Raspberry Pi tools.Highlighted is a DEF CON–style conference badge built around an ESP32 with e-ink and TFT displays that can be enhanced at ThinkCubator with a microphone, speaker and AI assistant. The incubator promotes reuse, hands-on learning, collaboration across roles, and practical prototyping for real-world use.

In this month episode, we interview Andrew Yourtchenko, old timer from Cisco TAC Firewall team, then Technical Marketing engineer for IPv6, release manager for VPP dataplanes and finally working at the IETF group over IPv6 and AI.

For the summer break, we come back on the best moments of our 3 years of this podcast and share our top 10 (or 11) episodes.

In today's episode, Cisco CX engineers and architects reveal how cruise ship networks are built and upgraded: everything from door locks and cameras to navigation and guest entertainment runs over the same segmented, secured infrastructure, and internet connectivity depends on intermittent satellite links so content must be stored locally. We follow a high‑stakes dry dock upgrade on a large cruise ship — with tight timelines, complex staging, and on‑the‑fly design changes to handle issues like NAT, multicast/PTP, MTU and firewall integration — and learn how planning, testing and rapid problem‑solving kept the ship sailing.

In this episode, we interview Sheikh Habeebul Haq who is the first visually impaired engineer to ever pass the CCIE exam. He tells us how the exam has been for him and how he helped develop accessibility in the CCIE exam.What about you ? What's your excuse for not going for CCIE ? :-)

In this episode, we interview Marcos Hernandez who tell us about the Isovalent products and integration. From Live Protect, to Cilium which allows kubernetes container networking with the same level of abstraction, mobility and security as fabric networking.

In this episode, we interview Liz Rice, a contributor to eBPF. She tells us what this technology means for the linux kernel but also for future security app, for kernel observability and last but not least for container networking. A technology so good it's even coming to Windows.

In this episode, we interview Jean Christophe Rode, principal engineer working in the IOS-XR engineering team. He also specalizes in SONIC support. He explains how this open source operating system is gaining ground and what are the difference with Cisco proprietary IOS-XR.No blue Hedgehogs are mentioned in this episode

In this episode , Tristan takes us through a tour of what Cisco is doing to make all network devices more secure, not just the new products. Security concerns are not just about security vulnerabilities, your base configuration has the biggest impact actually ...Resilient Infrastructure overview: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/about/trust-center/resilient-infrastructure.html#~overview Feature Deprecation details: https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en_us/about/doing_business/trust-center/docs/cisco-resilient-infrastructure-feature-deprecation-and-removal-details.pdf Alternatives:  https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en_us/about/doing_business/trust-center/docs/cisco-infrastructure-resilience-feature-removal-and-suggested-alternatives.pdf  Additional links on threat landscape in 2026: https://blogs.cisco.com/news/doubling-down-on-resilient-infrastructure https://blog.talosintelligence.com/salt-typhoon-analysis/