Zap!

June 18th, 2006 by Jerry

Had a little lightning storm last night. I wasn’t worried because most of my stuff is UPS/surge protected. However, with a particularly close lightning strike (the flash and boom were simultaneous), my network switch apparently died. Everything else seemed fine. No power outage or anything. So after replacing the switch with the hub I’ve had in my miscellaneous junk stash (don’t you have a spare 8-port hub?), I found out that the TV computer was still not coming online. After I checked it out (a long process of installing the previously removed video card and stretching a monitor cable up to it), it looked like the network card was zapped too. Great… Luckily, the motherboard has a spare network card, so I guessed which linux driver it needs, and somehow I guessed right, ’cause it’s working now. Also luckily, 5-port ethernet switches are quite cheap, so I got a replacement. Why replace a switch when I already have a hub that works? Because I’ve had problems with linux network drivers not going into half-duplex mode (hubs require half-duplex to work properly, switches allow full-duplex), so my bandwidth would be horrible on a hub, but perfect on a switch. Back to normal.

Posted in Computer | 2 Comments »

2 Responses to “Zap!”

  1. on 28 Jun 2006 at 1:15 am   brandy
    sounds like you went through a lot of trouble
  2. on 28 Jun 2006 at 1:26 am   jerry.knight
    Apart from the desk climbing and the new switch buying, it only took a few minutes to fix. Guess I’m getting a little better at diagnosing these kinds of problems.. =P

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