Yes, VPN applications do protect your traffic. A VPN is like wearing a costume or a mask because it masks your real identity and location, just like a costume or mask hides who you are in real life. Here’s the breakdown of the analogy: VPN vs. Costume Analogy VPN Function Costume Equivalent Hides your IP […]
Teaching hexadecimal and binary, especially around bits, nibbles, and bytes, is an awesome way to introduce kids to how computers “think.” Let’s face it their world is fully computerized and networked. All communications is done in binary, bits, nibbles, and bytes. Heck, its the way computers think. Here is a deeper dive into why kids
Teaching Kids Hexadecimal and Binary Read More »
Teaching kids about networking (the digital kind, not social networking) can actually be a lot of fun if you break it down into simple, relatable concepts and use interactive activities. I have written other articles like teaching kids programming and teaching kids electricity. Here I want to talk about networking. Here’s a step-by-step approach to
Teaching Kids About Networks/Networking Read More »
I previously posted an article on teaching kids electricity with Squishy Circuits, as well as teaching kids about networks/networking, and someone asked what about programming. Great question. Back in the day (2005) there was a special computer (the XO) you could buy that was tuned to kids learning programming. It was called the One Laptop
Teaching Kids Programming Skills Read More »
Capturing network traffic with VLAN tags on a Windows computer can be tricky due to how network adapters and capture software handle VLAN-tagged frames. By default, Windows often strips VLAN tags before passing packets to capture applications like Wireshark. However, there are ways to configure your setup to properly capture VLAN information. 1. Install the
Capturing Packet Traffic with VLAN Tags on Windows Read More »
As a follow on to my article on whether AI can be used in Networking, this post dives in deeper to a question of will humans still be involved? And if so, how do we upskill that human expertise? To successfully integrate AI into network automation while ensuring human expertise is maintained, organizations and IT
Implementing AI in Network Automation While Maintaining Human Expertise Read More »
I often bring up the following point in classes I teach on Internet Fundamentals: did anyone see the application TikTok before it arrived on the scene? Ofcourse the answer is no. I then usually follow up with: did anyone adjust traffic capacity planning for the arrival of an application like TikTok? Again, the answer is
How Much of the Internet Traffic is TikTok? Read More »
Back in 2018 (I think) I was becoming increasingly aware of the QUIC protocol in my and other’s packet captures and I immediately dug in and wrote about it. As of recent data (now Feb 2025), QUIC (Quick UDP Internet Connections) is experiencing significant adoption across the internet. Websites have implemented QUIC, with HTTP/3—built upon
An update on QUIC Adoption and traffic levels Read More »
Cisco has a free self paced, online learning course – until March 24th, 2025! The course is called: AI Solutions on Cisco Infrastructure Essentials | DCAIE Learn about the essentials of deploying, migrating, and operating AI solutions on Cisco data center infrastructure. While it is Data Center focused, this knowledge applies to any network at various levels.
Want to Learn AI Networking Free? Read More »
Before I provide the example, let’s be straight up about AI. Relying on AI for everything is problematic because it diminishes human critical thinking, introduces biases, and creates dependency on automation that may not always be reliable. While AI excels at processing vast amounts of data and automating tasks, it lacks intuition, ethical reasoning, and
An Example of AI being used in Network Certification Training Read More »
As a hands-on technical author and instructor, I have been wondering if AI could possibly replace me. OK, perhaps not replace me, but instead enhance the training I have been providing for decades. I have discussed this with a number of others both on the instructional side and on the student side. From these discussions,
Can AI be used in Technical Network Training? Read More »
A recent discussion with several colleagues led to a discussion on how AI can be leveraged in the world of internetworking. With all the hype around AI, some pretty crazy things are being claimed by vendors, but looking under the surface requires specific solutions and, frankly, things become very vendor specific very quickly. I chose
How can AI be used in Networking? Read More »
What is btop? btop (aka btop++) is a modern and visually appealing resource monitoring tool for Linux and other operating systems. It is part of the bpytop family, created by the same developer, and is written in C++ for performance and efficiency. Like htop, btop provides detailed information about system resources, including CPU, memory, disk
A Better Linux Resource Monitor Read More »
I get asked for this list all the time, so I thought I would just post it. There are others of course, so see the bottom of this post for some others, but if I had to just pick 10, these would be the ones. Links will send you to Amazon, where if you buy
The Top Ten Networking Books for Reference Read More »
Here is a list of interesting/useful network/IP commands for Windows. Most of these commands must be run from the CMD app. To do this Open Command Prompt: In the search bar, type cmd and press Enter, or press Win + R to open the Run dialog. Administrative Privileges: In some cases you will need to
Network/IP Commands for Windows Users Read More »
