[geeks] Whee! Lightning strikes, AGAIN!

[Lionel Peterson]

On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 5:34 PM, <gsm at mendelson.com> wrote:

<snip>

> Gigabit ethernet is not, btw, it's 4 250mbit bi-directional pairs. So if you
> put some sort of static/surge protection on it, you need to put 4, not 2.

I'm not following you - are you saying that in Cat5e/Cat6 there are
four pairs communicating, or are you discussing Fiber?

I'm nearly at the point where I want RJ45 patch panels with surge
supressors on each jack, that or a big knife switch on any long runs.

I appear to have several (up to 8?) computers that got their NICs
fried, and the A/C that got mangled needs a new controller board and a
new motor (when the relay on the controller failed, it stopped the fan
motor. Without the fan motor running, the pipes iced up, then when I
tirned it off, the ice melted, dripping into the motor and killing
it...

This one of my least fun days in recent memory. Everything I touch
seems to be broken - I can't catch a break.

Happily, I got my new cable modem installed, swapped in a WRT-DD
router for one with (apparently) fried ports, then I swapped a Cisco
2950 in for a now *zapped* Netgear 10/100 24 port switch... Basic
connectivity is up, and now I have to test machines and diagnose NIC
failures in each box.

Argh.

(I'm currently trying to get an old Intel Pro/100+ NIC to work in my
daughter's machine, but it insists on netbooting, and I can't figure
out how to stop it (nothing in the NIC setup program to do that, and
the BIOS doesn't list network boot, so I can't disable it there)...
Rather than "waste" a gigabit NIC on this old Dell DImension 4700, I
may use the occasion to upgrade her box to something with a faster CPU
and a built-in NIC. This thing is a bit s-l-o-w by current standards.)

-- 
Lionel Peterson
lionel4287 at gmail.com