I find the reactions on this mailing list disturbing, to say the least. The rush to judgement about what happened appears to be based on speculation and assumptions about how this large facility was run, managed and staffed. As far as I can see, the known facts are: There was an oversize layer 2 network and it broke. It was hard to repair. The CTO is a physician on the hospital board who, on first sight, appears to have considerable qualifications in the IT area. The unknowns are: How many, if any, employees are there who are directly tasked with maintaining the network? How well trained are they? How well documented was the network? How well did whatever staff were responsible for maintaining it actually understand the network? What sort of reporting was done - did anyone raise the issues of the size of the network? Was any risk assessment done? How much planning had been done, if any, to address the problems? How did the network get to be the way it was? Did it just grow or were changes forced upon it by external constraints? Why was it hard to repair? But people are speculating with no knowledge of the actual organisation, history, planning, what risk assesment had or had not been done, or any other information excpet guesses and prejudices about what they think might have happened and an apparent assumption that this is all the result of turning over a large enterprise network to a jumped up physician whose only qualification was running a couple of Linux boxes on a home network. None of the above unknown issues have been addressed anywhere. I hope the posters never pull jury service, as there seems to be a complete disregard for the idea of gathering facts before passing judgement. -- Jim Segrave jes@nl.demon.net