Hardware destroyed

i've got 7 computers on a lan in my house. a few days ago the power went out, and when it came back on NONE of them could access the network, and two of them couldn't detect their network cards. all the lights on my router and network cards light up, but i can't ping any machine.

the only thing i can think of is the router got fried when the power went out even though it's on a serge protector. assuming that, is it possible for the network cards to get fried also? and is there a lifespan for serge protectors? this one is 5 or 6 years old.

Hi,

1. All items will obey the laws of entropy and "die" eventually.

2. Your surge protector will protect just such and such a magnitude of surge.............bigger ones get through?

3. I have seen this with lightning strikes...........the frying comes through the telephone connection.....not the PC.

4. Try dismantling and re-building your network........test each component machine individually, then re-assemble.

5. For that many boxes I would think about a UPS?

Good luck

Some of your hardware may well of got fried but in the first instance i would try re-installing the drivers for the two machines that don't see their network cards. This may cure that problem. Secondly if you assume that no damage was done to the hardware of you router you may have to flash update your routers software as the basic software may have been corrupted when your power went out. Then reconfiguer your network.

If these steps don't solve your problems then you will have to lool at components for damage.

i've had modems die from lightening, but i've never heard of network cards getting fried threw lan cables. i reinstalled the os on one of the boxes with no luck. one of them is suse linux and the other is debian, i've never had problems with them before. the other five machines are freebsd, and i can't bring up the interfaces on any of them with ifconfig, even though the settings all appear to be correct. i guess i'll go tinker with them some more. thanks for the help!

well i just booted one of the boxes up in knoppix and another in demolinux, and i'm able to ping each other no problem, so i guess that rules out hardware as the problem. i guess back to the config files i go.

You didn't by any chance install a firewall before this happened did you?

there's a firewall on my gateway machine, but it's working fine....it's what i'm using to get on the internet now.

and the firewall only blocks outside traffice, it doesn't look at my internal traffic