Spanning tree melt down ?

Thu Nov 28 06:04:42 UTC 2002

On Wed, 27 Nov 2002, Bohdan Tashchuk wrote:
> 	Dr. John Halamka, the former emergency-room physician
> 	who runs Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center's gigantic
> 	computer network.
>
> Is a physician, after years of medical school, internship, residency,
> etc. the right person to be in charge of a "gigantic" computer network?
> Are arteries and veins the equivalent of fiber and CAT-5?

Do a Google search on John Halamka.

http://www.hms.harvard.edu/office/halamka.html

I suspect he knows more about networks than several posters on
this topic.

Nevertheless, it does show that "stuff happens."  I am a bit
surprised it took three days to fix things, but it wouldn't
be unprecedented.  Learning how to diagnose problems is hard
for both doctors and engineers.  Even more difficult is teaching
people how to design networks for failures.  Unfortunately,
many high availability designs make it more difficult to diagnose
and fix problems.  Sometimes you are better off with a simplier
design which fails in simple ways.