Damn lightning…

Posted by jerry as Uncategorized

I was awoke this morning by a storm coming in.  I really hate that sound in the middle of the night, because my kids are very afraid of storms.  I was counting to myself how long it would take to hear the first set of footsteps.

The rain picked up and the thunder rumbled on.  The kids did come down as I expected.  I convinced them to play in the family room and let my wife and I sleep a bit more.

It seemed like I had just fallen asleep when I heard and explosion and felt a blinding light shine through my closed eyes.  It was really close.  Probably hit a tree in my back yard.  Nothing seemed out of place, other than the ghost-white kids in my doorway.  The aquarium in my room was still working, and the bedroom light my oldest son turned on was sure as hell working.

My wife got up shortly after, and I went back to sleep.  (too many sleeping pills the night before - long story).  When I did wake up, I pulled my laptop out from under the bed, and unfortunately no Internet connection.

After a long morning of moving furniture and testing network ports, I found that I had 2 network cards die on me.  One in the new PC I had recently bought, and the other in the file server/firewall server in the basement.  I’ve spent a lot of money on lightning and surge protection for all of my equipment, including the cable modem, but apparently the EMP from the lightning induced a charge great enough to fry the two NICs.

Fortunately, I had some NICs laying around and got things running again, but that’s pretty frustrating.  I am glad that it was nothing more serious, though.