Well good news folks !  The new laptop is on the delivery truck on its way !  So I’ll be spending the rest of the day (among other things) backing up the current laptop in preparation for a nice big data dump to the new one. 

In other news . . . the storms that came through early Sunday morning seamed to have hit our cable modem yet AGAIN.  It also blew out a NIC on the firewall / internet filter (since the modem was plugged into the WAN card of the firewall).  This is modem number three is as many years and piece of equipment number . . . well I dunno.  I’ve been full time here for the last 5 years and in that time we’ve lost three modems, two switches, a server, several cards and phones in our phone system, and a couple of computers . . . all to lightning. 

I’ve been charged with looking into why we get hit so much. 

There were a few times when the buildings themselves (or the power lines just outside) actually got hit and then . . . well there’s not much to do in that case.  Even surge protectors wont do much good when the metal building takes a direct hit.

But we keep loosing cable modems and whatever piece of equipment is hooked directly into them (switch, NIC in the firewall, etc).  And that tells me that a majority of the surge is coming in through the cable (as in the cable TV cable to the modem).  I’ve been told by Comcast that I cant plug the cable itself into a surge protector as that messes with the upstream data and the way that the modem talks to the rest of Comcast’s network.

So now I’m going to call them back and find out what I should do since I keep loosing equipment (like every summer something is hit via the modem). 

Anyone know of a commercial surge suppressor for coax cable that wont mess with the upload Hz of the modem ?