It’s been a very quiet week here in IT Land.  Things have been going smoothly, and I’ve been spending today closing out the week and cleaning up where needed.

Around 2:30 we had a sweet thunderstorm roll through the area, and I sat outside for awhile and took it all in.  Afterwards, I sat down at my desktop and saw that my MSN connection was down.  In fact, everything internet-related on my PC was disconnected.

I went over to our MDF to look at the firewall.  It was off and pressing the power button didn’t bring it back to life.  My first thought was “toasted power supply,” but after doing some diagnosis, Jeff and I actually discovered that it was our cable modem that took the lightning hit.  It made more sense, because the cable connection is the only thing in the server room that wasn’t surge-protected.

The strange (but great) thing?  The strike only took out ONE port on our Ambit cable modem.  The modem has 4 ports, and amazingly enough, the other 3 ports work just fine.

Here’s a shot of the cable modem.  It was plugged in on port 4 when the lightning hit.

Here the ethernet cable that connects the cable modem to our firewall.  And no, that’s not BBQ sauce on the end of the cable.

Finally, the nic that was in our pfSense box.  I can’t believe this didn’t go beyond the nic and take out our whole firewall.

And I’ve gotta hand it to Time Warner, their customer service was excellent.  Within 5 minutes of dialing their number, I was able to arrange for a new modem to show up the next day.  Very nice.