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Hospital Brought Down by Networking Glitch
hey! writes "The Boston Globe reports that Beth Israel Deaconess hospital suffered a major network outage due to a problem with spanning tree protocol. Staff had to scramble to find old paper forms that hadn't been used in six years so they could transfer vital patient records and prescriptions. Senior executives were reduced to errand runners as the hospital struggled with moving information around the campus. People who have never visited Boston's Medical Area might not appreciate the magnitude of this disaster: these teaching hospitals are huge, with campuses and staff comparable to a small college, and many, many computers. The outage lasted for days, despite Cisco engineers from around the region rushing to the hospital's aid. Although the article is short on details, the long term solution proposed apparently is to build a complete parallel network. Slashdot network engineers (armchair and professional): do you think the answer to having a massive and unreliable network is to build a second identical network?"
... "an old boys' network"
Yes, I believe we should rush to conclusions and blame it on foreign terrorists since there is nothing suggesting terrorism, and that just proves that they're extremely sneaky.
You may now begin to panic in an orderly fashion, thank you.
Wax-Museum Fire Results In Hundreds Of New Danny DeVito Statues
The crisis began on a Wednesday afternoon, Nov. 13, and lasted nearly four days.
Did that mean the doctors couldn't play Quake for four days!?
Oh, that's so cute. Sounds like true love. How long have you and Brian been together? Where did you meet?
I live in the Boston area, and I have the perfect solution: they should hire me. I'll make sure their network never fails.
Well, maybe not. But I still need a job... =)
Of course the answer is to build a completely seperate network if I am the one who you will pay to build it ;)
This is obvious.
In truth the network problem was not a physical one so then solution should not be a physical one.
Someone moded Kathleen's "Yes" as Offtopic. He can kiss those moderator privileges goodbye.
:)
If "offtopic" results in a loss of moderation rights I'd hate to see what the consequences would have been for calling her a troll
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Yeah, that ability to compute using both metric and imperial units in parallel really comes in useful ;-)
Help children born unable to swallow - www.tofs.org.uk
"Dammit, Jim, I'm a doctor, not a CCIE!"
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
There was an electrician named Joe at the place I used to work who was counting the days to retirement. He never did a lick of work he didn't absolutely have to, and he never cared if his work would last 24 hours after his retirement.
The NEC (National Electrical Code) was the first casualty of his attitude. But not the last!
I discovered that he carried a heavy-duty plug in his pocket with the two hot leads wired directly together. He called it his "pigtail".
When Joe needed to find what circuit breaker controlled an outlet, he jammed in the pigtail (with an audible *snap* of electric arc) and then calmly walked down to the nearest breaker box to see what had tripped.
You could tell he was working in a building because you'd see scientists running down the hallways tearing their hair and screaming "My research!!! My research!! Ten years of research ruined!!" as the voltage spikes destroyed their equipment...
Mail any lucrative^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h job offers to:
Former MIS Director,
Beth Israel Deaconess hospital
Boston, MA 02215
It would be the fault of the fat person. You always blame anything on the fat person, because they're always the ones screwing the rest of us up.
The last time I had a problem with a spanning tree algorithm I lost 12 points on my CS final!
Ok, so seriously, I'd be embarassed if I screwed up a spanning tree algorithm on a test. If it took Cisco engineers 6 days to fix it, it musta been something really quirky, most likely the software not configuring something right. I can't imagine an application problem that would hose a network past a power toggle.
paintball
Why not buy M$ wireless 802.11b install W2K/XP on every computer and set up an MS exchange server. Who needs BSD when you have M$ :)
<I>just kiddi'n the uptime of the above mentioned network would be measured in nanoseconds, and then they will have to switch MS paper'n'pen method</I>
Live for the present, learn from the past, and dream of the future!
It's always nice to see those people doing useful work for a change.