STRESSFUL MARCH

Some days back I made a post about how I traveled in March which were some of my basic highlights, however, the traveling wasn't all that there was to it, if I should give a total sum of what the month of March was for me it is the word “stressful.” A big issue arose in my company in the middle of last month which was orchestrated by some activities that happened over a year ago. The MD of my company called me early in the morning asking if I could build the company's main website which had been down for months. After giving it a deep thought, I decided to do it even though it wasn't in my job description. My MD notified me that it wasn't the first time he was building the website, And it had been crashing every time the IT personnels before me tried building it.

This made me do a full scan of the website to try to figure out what was wrong with it. After a week of searching through every single database on the website, I discovered an error among the database files. It was a foreign set of codes in the database which was causing a large flow of data in and out of the host server. In simple English, someone was sharing the company's server and hosting another domain on the server. In a more similar English, it means the website was hacked, and the person who hacked it brought the company's website down to run their own website on the company's host.

This was a big discovery for me and I must confess it wasn't easy to find, I was even lucky to have seen and noticed it. Otherwise, any further action to revive that website will be in vain. I told the company to purchase security software from a cybersecurity expert I knew, and I was able to use it by first cleaning up the whole database and backing up only the company's files. By the time I was done with that, I then proceeded to start building the company's website. Building the website from scratch is a lot and has been taking the majority of my time even to date. Even when I traveled to the village for my grandma's burial, I had to go with the company's laptop just so I could continue doing my job.

But then after the burial, the server of the website we are currently using went down. It turned out the domain for that server had expired, but that wasn't the issue, the other issue was that there was no record of the domain name in the company's database. It turned out that the person who bought the domain for the company who happened to be the first IT personnel to work with the company used his personal details to purchase the domain, and never submitted those details when he was leaving the company. I told my boss who contacted him but he was denying the fact that the domain is still under his custody. This guy prolonged the issue by continual denial for over a week until March was over, leaving me with no other option but to look for alternatives.

I had to pursue the website I was building and figure out a way to get back access to the domain which was impossible. At the beginning of April, he decided to finally admit that it was in his custody but not without a refusal to surrender it unless he was paid off. My MD had to pay him to reactivate the domain because, in a real sense, the domain wasn't really expired but only shut down by someone with domain access. He has reactivated the domain and now we are looking to do a full transfer of all the company's web assets to a new host to give the company full access to all web assets. Before now the previous IT personnels had full access to the company's web assets until this issue after which I advised my boss to do the transfer even though he knows nothing about the website he can give whoever he wishes controlled access and revoke those access at will. This was what I've been going through since March and we are currently at funding for the transfer of host which would make April another busy month for me.

ALL PICTURES ARE MINE

THIS IS MY RESPONSE TO HIVE LEARNER'S PROMPT FOR WEEK 109 EPISODE 3