We had some fireworks on the 4th of July … Unfortunately they weren’t the usual kind.
It is a tradition in the US to fire off fireworks on the 4th of July in celebration of Independence day. Well, the Weirich household had some fireworks, but it’s not what you would expect.
What we thought at the time was a really loud firecracker from the neighbors turned out to be a close lightening strike, probably hitting the phone line. I discovered later that my DSL router (attached to the phone line) was dead (as in no lights, no power).
After a picking up a new DSL router on Wednesday from the phone company, it still didn’t connect and the phone company promised to send a technician out one Friday. Arrgh! Three days with no internect! Sigh.
The technician arrives Friday, checks out the wiring and decides to upgrade the “system”. Part of the upgrade is another new DSL router (different model from the replacement unit I picked up Wednesday). We connect up the laptop to the DSL router and everything looks great.
So once the phone guy leaves, I start hooking up the rest of the network: firewall router, network hub, wireless base station, and the other computers in the house.
And nothing works.
It looks like the lightening not only took out my DSL router, but it also got the firewall, network hub and wireless base station. Fortunately, I have another firewall and hub in my spare parts box.
I’m not certain of the total extent of the damage yet. The cables running to the other computers in the basement seem to be bad now (tested by against my working laptop). Since I don’t have long enough replacement cables, I haven’t checked out the network cards in two of the computers yet.
I am a bit surprised by the cables going bad. I understand delicate electronic equipment fried by lightening, but the cables are just wires and connectors. For them to be bad must mean the strike was strong enough to short them out somehow. And that doesn’t sound good for the network cards at the other end of the cable. Sigh.
On the good side, the my desktop computer that sits right next to the network equipment is up and running on the network. So one would that the network card in it is ok. However, it does seem to be a bit slow when browsing web pages. I mean really slow. I timed it against my laptop. What loads two seconds on my laptop takes over 20 seconds on the desktop. But that sounds more like a network configuration error than a hardware issue. Sigh, more work to do.
At any rate, it looks like there will be a run to the local computer store soon.