Spanning tree melt down ?

Fri Nov 29 17:22:45 UTC 2002

Marshall,

"It was Dr. John Halamka, the former emergency-room physician who runs
Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center's gigantic computer network"

It appears what really happened is that they put an emergency room doctor
in charge of a critical system in which he, in all likelyhood, had
limited training. In the medical system, he was trusted because of he was
a doctor. The sad thing about this is that there seems to be no
realization that having experienced networking folks in this job might
have averted a situation that could have been (almost certainly
was?) deleterious to patient care.

We all know folks who are unemployed thanks to the telecom meltdown, so
its not like this institution couldn't have hired a competant network
engineer on the cheap.

Sorry for the rant - I just hate to see the newspaper missing the point,
here. They didn't have one quote from an actual networking expert. It does
look like Cisco took the oportunity to sell them some stuff - looks like
someone got something out of this - too bad it wasn't the patients :)

- Dan

On Wed, 27 Nov 2002, Marshall Eubanks wrote:

>
> Anyone have any idea what really happened :
>
> http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/330/science/Got_paper_+.shtml
>
> <snip>
> It was too late. Somewhere in the web of copper wires and glass fibers that
> connects the hospital's two campuses and satellite offices, the data was stuck
> in an endless loop. Halamka's technicians shut down part of the network to
> contain it, but that created a cascade of new problems.
>
> The entire system crashed, freezing the massive stream of information -
> prescriptions, lab tests, patient histories, Medicare bills - that shoots
> through the hospital's electronic arteries every day, touching every aspect of
> care for hundreds of patients.
> ...
> The crisis had nothing to do with the particular software the researcher was
> using. The problem had to do with a system called ''spanning tree protocol,''
> which finds the most efficient way to move information through the network and
> blocks alternate routes to prevent data from getting stuck in a loop. The large
> volume of data the researcher was uploading happened to be the last drop that
> made the network overflow.
>
>
> Regards
> Marshall Eubanks
>