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November 04, 2026

Lab Work: What a Slow USB Drive Looks Like in Wireshark (And Why Testing Matters)

Lab Work: What a Slow USB Drive Looks Like in Wireshark (And Why Testing Matters)

If you spend enough time troubleshooting networks, you eventually discover that not every performance problem is actually a network problem. Sometimes the culprit is a server, an application, a disk, or a little portable USB drive that seems to have all the time in the world. That is one of the reasons I enjoy doing hands-on lab work. You can read documentation, watch videos, and memorize protocol details, but there is something special about deliberately creating a problem, observing it, and learning what it looks like when it happens in the real world. For this experiment, I connected a slow USB portable drive to a server, copied files to it, and used Wireshark to observe the network traffic associated with the transfer.

November 01, 2026

Will AI Destroy America? — An Honest Discussion (Keith Bromley)

Will AI Destroy America? — An Honest Discussion (Keith Bromley)
 A fundamental problem that has finally boiled to the surface is If artificial intelligence (AI) can destroy the United States of America; along with the follow-up question of How will it destroy the United States?

While nobody knows the future for certain, the possibilities of how the United States could be destroyed fits into five basic categories. Note:  there are lots of subcategories that could be created, but let’s just focus on the five highest levels:

October 31, 2026

Plasma Jet Engines: The Future of Fuel-Free Aviation?

Plasma Jet Engines: The Future of Fuel-Free Aviation?

What If a Jet Engine Could Fly Without Burning Fuel?

Imagine an aircraft engine that doesn't burn kerosene, doesn't need a conventional combustion chamber, and instead uses electricity to turn ordinary air into a high-energy plasma. It sounds like something borrowed from a science-fiction movie, but researchers have been investigating exactly this concept.

October 26, 2026

Why Wireshark Shows Large Packets on One Computer but Not the Other: Understanding TCP, IP and UDP Offloading

Why Wireshark Shows Large Packets on One Computer but Not the Other: Understanding TCP, IP and UDP Offloading

If you have ever used Wireshark to troubleshoot a network issue and wondered why one computer appears to transmit enormous packets while the receiving computer sees normal-sized Ethernet frames, you are not alone. At first glance, it can look like packets are being lost, fragmented, or mysteriously changed somewhere along the network. Before replacing cables, blaming a switch, or spending the afternoon chasing a problem that does not exist, there is an important question to ask: **Are you looking at actual network traffic, or are you seeing the effects of network interface offloading?** Features such as TCP Segmentation Offload (TSO), Generic Segmentation Offload (GSO), Large Send Offload (LSO), and checksum offloading can change what Wireshark displays, depending on where the capture takes place.

October 25, 2026

Beyond Port Speed: How Cisco’s New Technology Could Shape AI Data Center Networking

Beyond Port Speed: How Cisco’s New Technology Could Shape AI Data Center Networking


Why high-speed connections are only part of the equation—and how packet analysis helps engineers keep AI workloads moving.

AI Is Changing the Network
Artificial intelligence is changing the way data centers are designed, built and operated. Training large AI models requires thousands of accelerators to exchange enormous volumes of data, while inference services must deliver results with predictable latency and high availability.

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