Protect my network from lightning induced surge.

[darkwizard06]

Hi. Good day.

 

I have 15 units of desktop computers and 1 server, switch, router, ap, firewall etc.  They are operating simultaneously almost 24 hours every day. I've heard that lightning strikes whether it is not direct can induce surge and damage computers including network peripherals. All of the units have their own UPS.

How can I protect my computers from surge coming from the DSL or ethernet? Is it possible for electrical surge to travel through ethernet cables and fry my nic and motherboard? Do i really need this kind of protection?

 

Please help me with this.

 

Thank you very much.

[Tea1337]

Unless it were to strike directly to the ethernet cable, and right to the computer, it's very unlikely to get that far and cause any damage. Since it would have to go through the source cable, (modem?), networking switch then anything else you might have from outside to your computer.

[W-L]

3 minutes ago, darkwizard06 said:

-SNIP-

It's hard to determine what will happen if you have a lightning strike as there is so much power, your best option would be to install a whole home surge/lightning suppressor which usually will kill itself if it sustains a hard enough hit to save things down the line at least in your electrical system. 

[tt2468]

17 minutes ago, darkwizard06 said:

Hi. Good day.

 

I have 15 units of desktop computers and 1 server, switch, router, ap, firewall etc.  They are operating simultaneously almost 24 hours every day. I've heard that lightning strikes whether it is not direct can induce surge and damage computers including network peripherals. All of the units have their own UPS.

How can I protect my computers from surge coming from the DSL or ethernet? Is it possible for electrical surge to travel through ethernet cables and fry my nic and motherboard? Do i really need this kind of protection?

 

Please help me with this.

 

Thank you very much.

Do you actually expect lightning to strike? Lightning won't strike an ethernet cable unless it's outside (which is highly unlikely unless a conductor is bare.) If a surge hits phone lines, it should only effect the most immediate devices, and nothing else.

[brwainer]

To the people who say lightning will never strike the ethernet line: You would be surprised (shocked?  ) to know how easily ethernet lines can conduct electricity. Every year we have to replace about a hundred switches due to storm damage. The damage can be individual ports, switch port groups (inside a large switch there are chips that control a small section of ports, usually 8 in the case of the HP switches we primarily use), clearing all settings, causing the power supply to internally fault (which can't be reset - must be repaired), or complete switch failure. And residents who are connected to switches that fail in such a way sometimes find that their NICs are damaged too, and we have lost APs and cameras through surge damage. I have seen a single lightning strike on an apartment complex building take out 26 switches in 4 seperate buildings, plus 142 APs and at least 12 resident devices - that was the worst single event we have ever seen. Our most common storm failure is the switch port group (that chip for 8 ports) dies.

 

Our switches are either in an internal room inside the building, or are inside a weatherproof steel box on the side of the building. The outdoor enclosures are no worse for damage than the indoor ones - and that massively catastrophic event I posted above happened at a site with indoor rooms for the switches. The APs that died were all installed in resident's apartments, on interior walls. Ethernet in the complexes we service is rarely run through the exterior walls, and if the enclosure is an outdoor one, the ethernet goes directly into the back of the box.

 

So what do we do, or I do personally, or I recommend that you do? As a company we don't try to mitigate storm damage - it's just not feasible to surge protect every ethernet connection on both the switch and resident sides. Any equipment that dies is covered under the property's general insurance. Any resident equipment would be covered by their personal renter insurance - and we are not liable for that even if they don't have insurance, connecting to the ethernet is an assumption of risk. Personally, any connection coming from the wall should go through some sort of surge protection. You can get surge protectors and UPSs that have DSL, Coax, and Ethernet surge protection. Be aware that if a surge does happen, the connection through that device will stop working - that's how it protected you. I forgot about this a few months ago and called the cable company out for very low signal strength on our TV - it turned out that my surge strip was passing barely any signal over the coax. This is how you know it did its job properly, and needs to be replaced.