Spanning tree melt down ?

Fri Nov 29 17:38:34 UTC 2002

Radia Pearlman lives only a few miles away - they could have asked her 
for a quote :)

However, I would not be too harsh towards Dr. John - it is common 
practice in specialty organizations to put a member of the club  in 
charge of every department, even if most of the decisions are actually 
made by the staff, as he or she is supposed to better understand the 
needs (and lingo) of the organization.

In  the military, for example, an Officer is always in charge of an 
installation -
literally the CO - even if he and his aide are the _only_ military 
personnel stationed there - which happens sometimes with highly 
technical  activities.

So I would not assume that the good Doctor is actually the one 
configuring the network.

I wonder if Cisco will be moving them from an enormous  flat Layer 2 
network to
a more sensible Layer 3 IP network.

Marshall

On Friday, November 29, 2002, at 12:22 PM, Daniel Golding wrote:

> 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
>>
>