Lightning Strikes

I just got back from a client with a home office. We had some nasty thunderstorms and it appears that the juice from a close hit travelled through their cable. It blew the cable modem, the linksys router and the onboard Nic for one of the two machines.

Here are a couple of thoughts on this..

• I've been meaning to get Network Surge Protectors for my systems, They are less than $30 each and go inline with your ethernet connection to the PC.
• This drives home the idea of (1) Always having a good data backup and (2) Having a disaster plan, even for a small or home office. Fortunately it appears that only the one NIC was lost. I have seen cases where lightning will fry motherboards, power supplies and even hard drives.
• We have a lightning suppressor on the main circuit panel of our house. It came with the house when we bought it. I'm not sure how effective they are but it would be worth running it by your electrician
• When you get hit by lightning, it is possible that you will experience some other failures a few days down the road. Components may have been weakened but may not fail immediately.
• Surge suppressors should be replaced after a strike. Most of them wear down as they take hits.

Overall, they were pretty lucky. No one got hurt and there were no fires.