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?"

Comments

the sad part

[tps12]

This event has a lesson for us. Of course, I expect the Slashdot response to be something along the lines of "they should have used Linux," but the true fact is that all technology, even Linux, is unreliable. Rather than dicking around with which OS can provide the best network, we should accept that none of them provide the robustness necessary for things like hospitals and fire departments, and what we really need is to reduce our dependency on technology altogether. If the hospital had been paper-based, this tragedy would not have occurred.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Problem was with an application,

[rppp01]

Well.....I guess you could look at most of the sites we slashdot.....one application (IE, Mozilla, Opera, etc) takes down an entire site for hours and days and sometimes longer.