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- 2002-09-05 08:39:51
We at slithytoves apologize to our regulars and the people we host for the upwards of two weeks downtime. As many of you already know, our house (or possibly our power line?) was hit by lightning on August 21 shortly after 8 PM local time. - - - -
We had just put Sophia down for the night. The weather was typically summer rainstormy with flashes and low rumbly thunder all about. Then the superbright flash of nearby lightning made it daytime, followed by a crack that sounded like someone had fired off a rifle inside our house. I thought I saw sparks flying from various sockets but it may just have been lightning afterburn on my eyes. The classic smell of fried electronics (mixture of melted plastic and burnt transformers) slowly filled the house. Sophia slept peacefully through it all.
We suspect that we were zotted both on the power and the coaxial line so despite our UPS's, we lost networking equipment through the coaxial line which was (stupidly, in retrospect) unprotected. The cable modem survived, strangely enough, but the ethernet cable connecting the cable modem to the router got a pretty good jolt. The RJ-45 connectors on the patch cable connecting those two pieces of equipment turned a smoky black. We lost every networking piece of equipment in our NOC that was turned on and functional at the time except the WAP. That tally : one router, one switch, one hub, three network cards. Trinity (known to most of you as Slithytoves.ORG) is currently functioning on a borrowed network card that had been sitting in a machine waiting to be configured (was going to be the new Trinity!) and therefore off at the time of the strike.
The tally for non-computer related casualties : TV, vcr, 2 dvd players, stereo receiver, cd player, gamecube and in the oddest of all failures, the garage door opener.
I could go into full on rant mode about our insurance company now, but I think I'll leave that for another story. Of course this strike would happen the week before closing on our new house, and two weeks before we were set to leave town for several days. We ordered a router, but after it came in and we still weren't functional, we were unable to do any real troubleshooting until yesterday. At any rate, we are now, tentatively, back up. Apologies again to those who check us regularly and, of course, to the people whose sites we host. Also, thanks to Michael (aka Lanfaedhe) for putting up a temporary chat room for the slithytoves community in the interim.
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