Linux Magazine: The State of the Penguin: IT

“In the summer of 2004, Richard Silver faced a hacking dilemma,
literally.

“In the course of a converting a large, open air workspace to
cubicles, a construction crew at Silver’s East Alabama Medical
Center had come up with a simple, albeit blunt, solution to a
network wiring problem: instead of saving and labeling the
pre-existing cables, workers simply chopped the entire trunk of
incoming line at the ceiling and pulled new wire, even though
keeping the existing wire would have added barely an hour’s work to
construction. Silver, the medical center’s senior networking
engineer, was then faced with the daunting task of hooking up 60
new employees with a similar number of dead lines still attached to
the network. ‘I had no way of knowing if a port was off or if it
had been cut off,’ says Silver, looking back…”

Complete
Story