[ale] uptime, cool--New topic, keeping power on

[tom]

On Mon, 4 Sep 2006, James P. Kinney III wrote:

<<snip>>
> I had a nearby lightning strike several years ago that burned up every
> piece of networking equipment in my house and half the systems were
> damaged (system hardware failures over the next 2 months). The strike
> hit a tree about 5 feet from outside wall of my office. I was on the
> inside of that wall! A pair of 40W fluorescent light tubes were nearly
> ruined by the heat caused by the tubes glowing at about 200W melting the
> shrink wrap to them too tight to remove. The EMP induced an estimated
> 3KV in the phone line I was on and an estimated 500V in the cat5e lines
> feeding the network. OUCH!

We had a nice strike on a treee in the front yard this spring. Had to take 
the tree out (still sort of living but not likely for long) and redo the 
network components throughout the house. Speakeasy support got a little 
tickled by the error messages the fried dsl modem was not giving them, but 
in his defense he was on the tail end of a long shift.

Changes since then include a much more aggressive UPS policy (everything 
goes on a UPS, not just the computers), and some new surge protectors for 
some other stuff. That's probably not enough, but I'm not sure how much 
more effort is justified.

One idea I had was to use fiber optics for the local network, but I got 
the impression that there is a relatively high cost for the gear, and 
relatively few places carry the hardware. I'm open to opinions and leads 
on this.