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What Springfield’s Cyber Incident Likely Means: My Technical Read of the SPS Outage, Exposure Risk, and What to Expect Springfield Public Schools appears to be dealing with a severe, districtwide crisis that has moved beyond an ordinary IT outage: an outside group reportedly accessed the SPS network, disrupted essential systems, and left the district unable to retrieve student medical records, use phones reliably, or operate parts of its technology environment. The technical signs appear to be consistent with a ransomware-and-extortion event or some similar network compromise, though SPS has not publicly confirmed data theft, a ransom demand, or even a responsible actor. I don’t have any special knowledge of the event outside what the media has reported, so everything that follows is my speculation based on the reports that are slowly coming out and my own experience with technology stacks in educational organizations. ...

Learning a cloud platform is difficult partly because the documentation is so good. That sounds backwards, but Azure is a useful example. Microsoft has documentation for almost every service, feature, edge case, and architectural decision an admin could encounter. The problem is not a lack of information, it’s that the information is contained in a vast reference library, organized more for retrieval than for actually learning. When I need to understand something in Azure, particularly identity and access management, I have started using NotebookLM as a study tool. I feed it selected Microsoft documentation and use it to ask questions, generate outlines, and create audio discussions that make the material easier to revisit. The important part is not treating it as an authority. Microsoft’s documentation is the authority. NotebookLM is useful because it gives me another way to work through the otherwise overwhelming source material. ...

Recently I set up Azure Virtual Desktop on Windows LTSC to support a small set of older applications we still need from time to time. It was the kind of project that looks, at first glance, like a straightforward compatibility exercise, but in practice it turned into a useful reminder of how much institutional computing is really about continuity. The problem was familiar enough. We have a few applications that are still needed for specific workflows, but which do not fit neatly into the present-day desktop environment. They are not important enough to justify a full modernization project, but they are also not obsolete enough to disappear. They occupy that awkward middle ground familiar to anyone who works in higher-ed IT: software that is technically legacy, operationally necessary, and politically difficult to retire. ...

Most places treat identity and access management like paperwork. Someone needs access, a ticket gets filed, a permission gets granted, and everybody moves on. It’s the path of least resistance, but it’s also how you end up with an environment where nobody really knows who (or what) has access to what, and auditing anything becomes an archaeology project. Really, we should think about IAM as part of how a system is designed, not something that happens after the design is done. Who can touch what, how services authenticate to each other, what happens when someone leaves, these are all load-bearing decisions, not afterthoughts. Of course, many of us actually inherit systems that are pre-designed, which actually does seem like an archeaology project whether we want it to or not. I’ve taught courses on Windows Server and Active Directory, and I try to give my students realistic (read messy) environments to inherit, since they’re not going to get a clean forest when they walk into a Windows shop that’s been using AD for 25 years. ...

I have now migrated a library discovery layer twice in two years. At my previous institution I finished an EBSCO Discovery Service update just before leaving. Then I arrived at my current job, assessed the environment, and realized that the Primo instance I’d inherited was still running Classic — not Primo VE, not NDE, but the original, pre-Angular, pre-modern-stack Primo that Ex Libris has been nudging libraries away from for years. Nobody had upgraded it because, until I arrived, there was no dedicated systems administrator to do it. ...

A few years ago I co-created a digital archive. The Victorian Jewish Writers Project began as a scholarly problem: nineteenth-century Jewish writers in Britain had been systematically excluded from the literary canon, their work scattered across out-of-print volumes, digitized newspaper runs, and institutional collections that had no particular reason to surface them together. The project was an attempt to do something about that, to gather, describe, and make discoverable a body of writing that existing finding tools were not built to find. ...

What Actually Happens When You Request an Article You’re deep in a research rabbit hole. You find a citation that looks perfect, click the link, and instead of the article you get a paywall or a dead end. So you click “Request via Interlibrary Loan,” fill out a form, and wait. A day or two later the PDF lands in your inbox. Magic, right? Not magic. Infrastructure. I want to walk through what actually happens in that window between your click and your PDF, because it involves half a dozen systems talking to each other in ways that are genuinely interesting and almost entirely invisible to the people who depend on them every day. ...

Sometimes sysadmin work can seem relatively thankless–you can be three layers deep in a log file, tracing why a resource-sharing request silently failed at 2am, even while you realize that nobody noticed. That’s not because the service doesn’t matter, but because when infrastructure works, it’s invisible. When it breaks, it’s a crisis. Just as most of us don’t regularly think of the pipes carrying water in and out of home unless something goes awry, digital infrastructure is invisible to most people most of the time. To use a tired phrase, that’s a feature, not a bug. ...