The problem started the way these things usually do. Crystal Reports stopped working. The server was reachable. You could ping it. SQL Server was up. Nothing obvious was broken, yet reports refused to run and kept throwing SSL and connection errors that looked vague enough to be annoying but serious enough to block real work. Ping working did what it
Tag: public sector IT
From the IT Administrator, GIS Staff, Network Engineer, Procurement Officer, and Whoever Else Isn’t Around That Day Let’s stop pretending this is a team sport. It’s not. In small utilities—and especially in local government—“IT Department” is often a fiction. It’s a polite way of saying one person who knows how to reboot things. That’s me. I’m the sysadmin, the GIS
“A Brittle and Fragile Future” by Vinton Cerf – Then, Now, and Why It Still Hits (Especially If You’re the IT Guy) Back in 2017, I was still working as a Software Tester—writing test cases, clicking buttons until they broke, and logging bugs developers swore couldn’t possibly exist. I was also a dutiful subscriber to Communications of the ACM, because
When a few government websites got defaced, it wasn’t just a prank—it was a wake-up call that the Philippines is already caught in the crosshairs of a silent cyber war. I didn’t get hacked. No virus took down my PC. No ransomware locked up my files. But when I saw a few Philippine government websites defaced—replaced with foreign symbols, strange