I work as IT administrator with a reputable firm in Lagos. I have worked with an ISP in Lagos and as network admin with a hotel that used to be one of the best in Lagos in the in the 90s till 201* before new hotels began to spring up around Ikoyi.

One fine morning, a hotel manager called me and requested a meeting. We agreed on a day and time. The hotel is somewhere on VI, Lagos. I called my colleague who works with an ISP to be in my company. I worked as a consultant for this hotel for few years until COVID struck and the hotel decided to have an in-house network engineer. I believe their experience with series of IT guys wasn't favourable as things went bad with time.

Mr A, I requested to see you. We have got a very serious challenge when it comes to IT in our hotel. Our internet is nothing to write home about. We have increased our bandwidth severally and our ISP continues to charge us exorbitantly but we don't get value for our money. Our guests complain all the time. Our systems give us issues. The wireless are so bad and so on. My MD personally requested to call you to help resolve this. He so much believe you can get it done. We are even scared of hackers' activities as our MD continues to receive some strange mails and system malfunction. I carefully listened to all the issues and I responded. Mr B, all these you are talking about are no issues. But it will require some systematic approach to get all resolved. You will give me some time to go round, check the system, do my general IT audit and give my recommendation. I need access to all systems of interest. I need all the contacts to the ISPs and I need to physically see things myself.

To be continued

Interested in this story

I came back the next day to physically inspect the LAN. I saw degraded cables still in use, very unkempt infrastructure with spaghetti cables everywhere. PDUs (extensions lying on the floor, too many APs in the system, too many unmanaged switches on the floor at desktop points. All ports and cable labels gone. The whole IT infrastructure was in complete disarray. I told myself that before I lay my hands on anything here, these nonsense I am seeing needs to be sorted out first.

I moved from cable to cable, rack to rack, switch to switch, router to router, of course, PC to PC.

Hmmm. Even if the Internet was superb, my first day observation would make it so useless.

In the existing infrastructure, there was absolutely no network security. The whole company relied on wireless AES passwords. Of course, most of the outdoor APs are not working. Those that were installed about 8 yrs ago. Some bullets attached to the AP antennas were nowhere to be found.

You can continue please