On Wed, 23 Feb 2022 at 06:49, Tim via users <users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Tue, 2022-02-22 at 12:21 -0500, Go Canes wrote:
> If it was just erasing the partition table the drive would still be
> visible using lsblk, and you could re-partition it with fdisk, etc.
I do wonder if the devices were ruined, or just had their data
scrambled? Neal didn't say whether he'd tried reformatting the failed
ones, I presume he would have, but he just mentioned replacing them.
Various magical incantations do sometimes seem to work:
> You mentioned a surge suppressor strip - any chance it has already
> suppressed a surge in the past? If so, it might not be functioning
> as a surge suppressor anymore.
Every day your house receives lots of surges. Most you'll never
notice. There's not just the times you notice the lights suddenly
glowing brighter. There's very fast and large spikes from the
continual switching of loads across the grid, and how the stations
manage them. Because of this, surge protectors are always working, and
will eventually die without you probably being aware of it.
I used to add surge protection to power bars. We had a tree fall on the
cable coax that they had installed without a proper anchor, just a zip tie
to the mast for the AC power. The mast was pulled off the house, which
meant the neutral line got disconnected first, and lightbulbs went off like
flash bulbs. My Victor 9000 PC with the home-made surge protection
survived, but we lost the doorbell transformer and a radio (and the
thyristers in the surge protector).
My father in law also used home-made surge protectors. A truck
hit a high-voltage distribution line, causing the high voltage wires to
fall onto the lower voltage feed to the house. His computer survived,
but some appliances died.
It's worth remembering that a surge protector may not protect your
equipment from being wrecked, primarily it should blow a house fuse on
a large surge to prevent some equipment catching fire and burning your
house down.
My power bar had a circuit breaker which did trip.
If you have noisy mains causing you a problem you want mains filtering,
possibly a UPS as well (a constantly running one, like a power
conditioner, not a changeover one that supplies raw mains until it
kicks in as a backup supply).
For what it's worth, considering my opening paragraph about the mains
always has spikes on it all day every day, that's normal. Any
equipment that requires external protection has not been built
correctly. Anything that plugs directly into the mains should be able
to handle what's normally on the mains, for its entire operational
life.
I grew up in an area with frequent power outages. My parents were
careful to unplug computers when not in use. We often put an overhand
knot in power cords. One day I had just turned on an electric kettle when
lightning hit near the house. The kettle had a metal base with a hole where
the cord passed thru and a 2-conductor cord. The cord burned off at the
hole -- I assume an induced current took a shortcut from one conductor to
the other. Nothing else was damaged.
The exception I make about that rule is when you want to minimise noise
on something that can handle it without damage, but the effect is
noticeably annoying and you want to reduce it. But again, the
equipment really should have been designed better. Stereo systems, for
instance, shouldn't crackle along with mains pops.
At work we had a small machine room with a window in the door. One day
during a storm I was walking past the room when lightning hit the building.
I saw a bright trail down the corner of the room and across one of the SGI
Octane workstations. Those systems had a heavy metal chassis under a
plastic cover, but there was a light bar outside the chassis. One of the
incandescent bulbs in the light bar burned out, but that was the only damage.
Better designed equipment costs more. I generally try to buy gear that
has been on the market a couple years, which gives time for drivers to
make it into the kernel and for design flaws to be noticed. Vendors often
reduce prices just before introducing new models. I once scored a
PowerEdge server with full complement of ECC memory for the price of
the memory days before a newer model was announced.
George N. White III
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