2-15 AM BOOM - Lightening strikes again

[GreyGeek]

A month ago lightening hit near our apartment and it blew the eth chip in my laptop. I purchased an $11 USB eth dongle to establish a wired ethernet connection.

Last night at 2:15 AM I was awakened by a nearby lightening strike. I opened UnderGround Weather on my iPHone to see what the storm looked like and couldn't get a wifi signal. Then I smelled burnt electrical wiring. I went to my computer station and turned on my laptop. No wifi signal but the wired connection came up. I checked my IPv6 and it was normal. Another storm was coming so I shut down my computer and unplugged everything from the wall.

This morning when I plugged the power cords back into the wall sockets and turned things on both the wired and wireless connection appeared in NetworkManager but when I tried to browse the web the browser complained that there was no connection. Neither connection was working. Transmit on the wireless seemed to work because it allowed NetworkManager to create a connection. But the wireless receive wasn't working and handshaking would not complete I unplugged the ethernet cable from my wifi router and unplugged the cable from the modem to the router and plugged my laptop directly into the modem and restarted the network. I could reach the internet and browse.

There are problems. My IPv6 tunnel won't come up and when I open a browser or click on a link after the browser opens it takes almost a minute before the page appears. When I use the IPv6-test.com site sometimes IPv4 comes up but IPv6 never does. If I repeat the test neither protocol is detected. If I run the HTML5 Internet speed test another 30 seconds elapse and then the test takes off and tells me that I am getting 70+Mbps down and 6Mbps up.

Spectrum's cable modem has taken it in the shorts and my wonderful Linksys E2500 with DD-WRT firmware is dead.

Thankfully, Allo's 100Mbps or 1Gbps fiber optic will be here within 60 days. I'll have to limp through till then. Meanwhile, I am putting off installing IPFS and ZeroNet until I get the speed back and my IPv6 tunnel back up.

[vinnywright]

spectrum may be experiencing some difficulty in your sub station .

shame you stuff wasn't plugged into a serge protector

on a side note my spectrum has native IPv6,,,,,no tunnel needed

VINNY

[oshunluvr]

I started buying UPS's for all my important tech stuff quite a while ago on the belief that this would be a modicum more protection. Of course when a huge thunder-boomer rolls through my wife complains about all the beeping!

[Qqmike]

And then--for the PC--there's the option of building with ASUS mobo's ...

Anti-Surge Protection

This special design prevents expensive devices and the motherboard from damage caused by power surges from switching power supply(PSU).

[GreyGeek]

Ya, vinny, and if IRC, you pay only $40/mo for your 100Mpbs connection, while I pay $65 for a 60Mbps.
We've had lots of boomers since we moved into this apt 5 yrs ago, so spark protection was assumed.

Besides, we never lost power. The spike came through the RG-58U, not the power line, so an UPS wouldn't have helped.

[GreyGeek]

Well, my cable modem began acting up and now has settled down to a steady 6Mbps down and 6Mbps up. 10% of what it should be. Tech coming Thursday.
Can't wait for Allo to light up the fiber optic they've installed.

EDIT: I found the reason for the slow speed. Several months ago a previous lightening strike took out my mobo's eth chip and I didn't want to replace the mobo, so I bought a 1Gb Eth-to-USB dongle for $11 to replace it. I've been running it in my USB3 socket since I bought it and have enjoyed 73Mbps speed. I needed the USB3 socket and moved the dongle to my USB2 hub. In USB3 the dongle is supposed to give 1Gbps speed and in USB2 100Mbps. Since the dongle is supposed to give 100Mbps speed in a USB2 socket and it has been working so well in a USB3 socket it didn't occur to me that the 6Mbps speed might have been due to using the USB2 socket. On a whim I switched it back to USB3 and I immediately started getting 73Mbps again..

Now I am wondering if the USB2 hub is the problem. I'm going to trying the dongle in a mobo USB2 socket.

EDIT: EDIT: Rats! The dongle runs at 6Mbps in a mobo USB2 socket as well. Off to Amazon and report the bad news.

[oshunluvr]

Besides, we never lost power. The spike came through the RG-58U, not the power line, so an UPS wouldn't have helped.

All the UPSs I have include coax surge protection, but I know from documentation that APC coax surge protection has an insertion loss of 2.3dB. So maybe it would be more trouble than it's worth. There are commercially available surge and lightening protection devices for coax but I suspect the cost would outweigh the necessity.

Besides, as anyone knows who lives in thunderstorm alley - there's not really anything you can do if Thor or Zeus wants you...

[GreyGeek]

.....

Besides, as anyone knows who lives in thunderstorm alley - there's not really anything you can do if Thor or Zeus wants you...

LOL!
They're weenies if they have to pick on a mere mortal like me.

A LOOONG time ago I used to own and use a UPS, which was protecting my last desktop computer, a Sony VAIO, which I purchased on Dec 27th, 1997. Really a great machine. It ran with Win95 for five months, during which I had to re-install Win95 FIVE times, so unstable was it. Under RH5 it ran till September without a single failure. Hard to make a living coding when you have to save every 3-4 minutes to avoid loss because of a crash. I used that 500 Watt UPS (the printer was not attached to it and it didn't have a coax filter), all the time I had that Sony. Never once did I lose power or get hit by lightening. I tested it a couple times after I initially bought it, and it gave me about five minutes to do a graceful power down, but I never tested again until I decided to give it and the Sony to a widow lady whose computer died on her. When I pushed the test button the Sony shut down like the power cord had been pulled out of the wall. Apparently the UPS battery was dead but the system lights gave no indication of that. Laptops have their own UPS, of course.