A year or so ago, an electrical storm fried the cable modem at CVH, and then fried a router and a few hubs downstream from the modem. I spent a long time trying to figure out a way to blame it all on the setup there: too many hubs, not enough surge protectors. When in doubt, blame Dirk (or Arif, I think he’d wired that office.) I was sure that in a reasonable network setup an electrical storm couldn’t toast that much equipment.
Our house got hit in Friday’s storm, and the power surge managed to fry the modem, the wireless router and Noah’s ethernet card. Cablevision replaced the modem (after I drove to East Flatbush and waited in line for half an hour) but not the router or the ethernet card, which has me wondering, once again, who to blame.
As far as I can tell, there’s no such thing as a surge protector for an ethernet cable. They sell them for phone lines, but our lightning strike didn’t actually come over the phone line. I’d like to figure out how not to have this happen again, but I don’t have a lot of bright ideas.
I’m starting to suspect that cable internet is a bum deal, end of story. It is one thing if your cable box gets fried and they replace it for free, but I don’t feel like replacing all my networking hardware everytime there is an electrical storm. Theoretically, I could have unplugged it all this time, but I’m not so sure that even touching the cable modem would have been smart.
it was Dirk who wired that office. I just did what I was told to do.
We get some pretty wild storms here in the midwest. My first summer here, I didn’t remember quite how wild they got, and left my DSL modem plugged in during a storm. We had a lightning strike nearby – nearby, and the modem was fried. Ever since then, when I knew we were getting a big nasty storm with lots of lightning coming through, I’d power donw and unplug everything from the wall/phone line. Mostly, that just means pulling the plug on the surge protector and unplugging one phone wire. Journaling filesystems and a RAID configuration help to keep that from being a really alarming proposition.
Of course, I don’t serve websites or provide mail services from home anymore, so I can do that. If you can’t turn everything off, then I honestly think you’re out of luck – at least on the affordable side of things. I seem to recall a thread on the riders list about this last year or the year before, maybe there’s something in there that has a better answer.
A little googling suggests that plenty of DSL systems get fried the same way.
I am faintly recalling that actually I posted something to the Riders list and the thread was in response to CVH.