[NTLUG:Discuss] lightening!

[kbrannen@gte.net]

Well, after almost 2 weeks of being off the 'net at home, I'm back.  Why 
should anyone care?  Because, you can learn from my woes, and hopefully not 
get "struck" yourself (via data-loss).

About 2 weeks ago my house got it by lightening.  No major structural damage 
(just a few hundred bucks), but it fried almost everything electronic in my 
house, including every computer.  I had everything on surge protectors (no 
real help when it comes to lightening IMHO), but not good enough.  Why? 
Because the lightening came in thru the network cable!  And lightening doesn't 
care if you're running a "good" OS or a "bad" OS. (to keep this slightly on 
topic :-)

So learn from my errors.  Find a network surge protector, or use the RH45 port 
on your UPS (if it has one).  No guarantees, but it will probably help.

Kevin

p.s. Thankfully, it just fried the motherboards, the hard drives were intact. 
  So thanks to home owner's insurance and careful work on my part, I have new 
computers and no lost data; just lost time in having to restore it all as well 
as a lot of running around getting repair/replacement estimates.  It's also 
got me rethinking my backup strategy (i.e. to make them more frequent. :-)