On May 13, 2010, at 2:26 PM, Mark Mayfield wrote:
About a month ago, we had a lightning strike near our main campus.
We lost one POE Cisco 3560 completely (apparently blown power
supply), and in a separate but nearby building, another 3560 lost
the ability to deliver POE, but continued to operate as a switch.
Both had to be replaced. Both were on wiring closet type UPS'es with
surge suppression, and those were unaffected.
Mark
-----Original Message-----
From: Caleb Tennis [mailto:caleb.ten...@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, May 13, 2010 10:37 AM
To: North American Network Operators Group
Subject: POE switches and lightning
We had a lightning strike nearby yesterday that looks to have come
inside our facility via a feeder circuit that goes outdoors
underground to our facility's gate.
What's interesting is that various POE switches throughout the
entire building seemed to be affected in that some of their ports
they just shut down/off. Rebooting these switches brought
everything back to life. It didn't impact anything non-POE, and
even then, only impacted some devices. But it was spread across the
whole building, across multiple switches.
I was just curious if anyone had seen anything similar to this
before? Our incoming electrical power has surge suppression, and
the power to the switches is all through double conversion UPS, so
I'm not quite sure why any of them would have been impacted at all.
I'm guessing that the strike had some impact on the electrical
ground, but I don't know what we can do to prevent future strikes
from causing the same issues. Thoughts?
It is not clear to me from the above if there are copper circuits
coming into the building, but lightning can certainly zap those as
well. In very high impact areas (such as mountaintops or Miami) it is
a good idea to mandate that all incoming / outgoing circuits are on
fiber, without exception.
Marshall
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