At this big university hospital, an incompatible piece of switching gear has been intermittently stopping access to an important clinical system, says a sysadmin pilot fish trying to deal with the problem.

“It required emergency outages at least a couple times a month for several months,” fish says. “Both I and the network tech knew that equipment incompatibility was the cause, and that the only permanent solution was to implement a network equipment change.

“Yet we could never get it done, because no one would authorize a planned outage. We both had a background in a hard-nosed, no-nonsense military organization, and used to shake our heads at how many times we had been called to repair this, but had been denied the opportunity to take a 15-minute to half-hour outage to permanently solve the problem.”

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