October blog post 📝

Hello everyone,

As an IT technician, there’s a lot of amazing small and complex issues I encounter on a daily basis and I embrace them with interest as technology is improving every passing day.

On Friday evening we got call from one of our clients in Buchanan which we have a 3-day monthly ICT maintenance contract with.

They informed us that their network had been down for a day. We advised the client to informing the Internet Service Provider (ISP) as they have no IT person on site to be sure before taking an action. The ISP than confirmed that they could ping the network from their server so there was no problem from their end.

I quickly arranged the next morning with all necessary equipment (RB 951 MikroTik router, RJ 45 connectors, Crimper and pitched network cable in case there was any power failure of the core router.

I got to the customer’s Head Office at about 9:30 am. They quickly arranged a vehicle to take me to the effected site, about 1-hr drive.

They were quite happy when I arrived and welcomed me by saying ‘’NATC’’ is here.   Well, this is how most of our client/staff called me even though they know my full name but some prefer calling me that way.

I opened the server rack and found the main Juniper router on with all status led(s) linking green. That was good enough to know that internet was reaching the device but not being distributed. I started by pinging the switches IP addresses and surprisingly the main Cisco switch could not be reached, but the power adaptor led of the switch was blinking. Immediately I replaced the adaptor with a new one, I could ping the switch, desktops and laptops were connected, and network printers automatically started printing out stored job and so on. All the departments I checked were working okay accept for the Field Department. The switch was on but there were no sign of signal.

By using my cable tester found out that one of the RJ 45 connecters was damaged. I replaced both ends using my crimping tool to restore network for that department.

I informed the Site Manager and Head Office on progress made.

When heading to have my lunch, an accountant staff complained that any Microsoft Excel email attachment received in her inbox opens blank and really don’t know what could be the issue. I told her, me take a look. She turned on her computer and displayed the problem to me.

I have seen this issue several times before. So, I knew exactly how to figure it out in less than a minute. The lady insisted that I show her how to resolve this issue in case it happen and I’m not around. Though we have an ICT contract with them and wouldn’t be an issue even if she complains hundreds times. As a technician, I’m there to resolve problem. For me, she sounded very smart. I told her yes we can do it together.

Here are the few steps to go on resolving issue like this for any Microsoft version. Now, open the Excel again that opens blank.

Open Microsoft Excel.

Click the File tab and select Options from the drop-down menu.

Click Advanced, then locate the ‘’General’’ section.

Uncheck the box next to Ignore other applications that use Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE).

Click OK and restart the Excel.

In a joking and friendly manner I asked her. ‘’Now everything works fine. Anything else I could help you with? Can I get back at the canteen and have lunch now’’?

After a heavy lunch, I drove back to Monrovia the same day and resumed work at my office the next day.

Reach out for NATC, the one stop IT Solution Company!

Prepared by: Daniel W. Collins (Senior IT Technician) New Africa Technology Company (NATC)

MIKROTIK BANDWIDTH CONTROL

Dear readers,

In this topic, I will be showing you a step by step instruction on managing your bandwidth in MikroTik RB951, CR S124 etc. routers as network administrator on a small or medium office network. As you may know, MikroTik is becoming more popular because of its user friendly advantage as compare to Cisco. You may not need to purchase a license to remotely control your network.

Let’s get started!

There are multiple ways of connecting to a RouterBOARD. (Winbox, webfig, telnet, ssh ...), but this guide will show how to configure the device using Winbox utility. Winbox utility can be downloaded from the MikroTik webpage (Winbox) or from the RouterBOARDs webpage.

First collect all users IP addresses manually to identify them in the DHCP server queues to perform this task.

Launch winbox as displayed below and click refresh to scan for device. As an administrator, you may need to assign a login name and password to secure your network. Now click connect.

Now you can see I have log into my RB951 office router after clicking ‘’connect’’ and click on IP, to get into my Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server.

In the DHCP server below, I have identified all of the IP addresses collected in ‘’leases’’ and these are the number of users on my network including unauthorized users. I am going to allocate an amount of bandwidth to each user now.

In during this, you will need to double click on the user’s IP, highlight and copy the IP address as displayed below and click OK.

After copying the IP address from the pop up menu, click on ‘’Queues’’ as displayed below.

When open, a new pops up. Click on the (+) and past the IP address you copy into the ‘’target’’ space and assign a name into the ‘’name’’ as shown below. You can follow these steps to create and manage many users as they get connected to you network.

You can now see how I created all my users in one queue.

Prepared by Daniel Collins