On Call: A hospital’s CT scanner network mystery solved

On Call, the reader-contributed column from The Register, features the real-life tech support stories that often come with a twist. This week, we meet a reader we'll call “Jake,” who found himself as the sole sysadmin for an entire hospital. His challenge? Diagnosing a sluggish CT scanner setup that linked to the hospital's imaging workstation.

While managing standard IT infrastructure, Jake was called upon to investigate why a critical imaging workstation was painfully slow when displaying scans. His initial assessment revealed the workstation was crawling—and that the connection involved a cable snaking from the CT scanner into a wall socket, then into the large workstation.

He noticed that this cable wasn't part of the regular hospital network and deduced the scanner and workstation were on a dedicated, isolated network. Following the cable path, Jake traced it into the hospital basement, through a cable gutter, then to a patch room on the building’s top floor, looping back down to the scanner and workstation—over a distance of roughly 250 meters, over four connectors.

Realizing the excessive cable length and multiple connections could be the root cause, Jake decided to unplug the cables from the wall and link the scanner directly to the workstation with a shorter cable. This simple fix reduced the cable length by approximately 245 meters, restoring normal operation and dramatically improving performance.

After completing his fix, Jake didn’t broadcast it—he simply enjoyed the glow of having saved the day, as hospital staff praised him as a “real wizard.”

Have a story of a silly network misconfiguration or other IT mishap? Share your experience with On Call by clicking here and join the community of tech support heroes.