Still Not Perfect

Sorry about our recent outage. One of the Memorial Day weekend lightning storms zapped our firewall’s motherboard. It took me a little while to figure out that the problem was the motherboard instead of the power supply. However, once I figured it out the part was suprisingly cheap ($9.99 for a motherboard with onboard UltraSCSI and onboard server class NIC, who would have guessed?). I guess the hardware is so old that the few vendors who still have parts left are trying to liquidate them. My UPS should have protected the whole system from the lightning strike, but for some reason it didn’t work as well as it should have. It kept the other two servers plugged into it up and running just fine, but the firewall got zapped. Maybe it is time to look for a better UPS, or maybe the surge came in through the cable modem (???). Or maybe I should count it as an acceptable risk for hosting at home instead of in a real data center.

Anyway, we’re back on line now thanks to cheap parts.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 8th, 2005 at 6/8/2005 9:52 am and is filed under General.