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Do you have earth return on your power?


Yes, and it works, too. But i have outbuildings with servers and networking gear in them and metal conduit between buildings on/underground. Voltage potentials don't care, if there's a wet extension cord or something that's a less resistive path to start flowing and some gear is on that circuit or adjacent, it'll go.

Overall switching to fiber is cheaper than aggressive lightning protection, and i moved all the network gear to a commercial UPS, and the interconnect between the "modems" and the switches is media converted to fiber for 3 feet. any time i have to run networking further than 6' or so i run fiber and put a media converter or a single gbic switch there. I'm hoping i futureproofed enough to upgrade to 10gbit in a year or so. My backup NAS has 10gbit but nothing else is connected at that speed yet.

edit: One time lightning hit a pine tree in the back of the house, and it used my dipole antenna to reach a tree 80' away, and apparently there was an extension cable near there, which went back into the house, and it went all the way around the house, to reach the telco CPE box where DSL lived. the telco box and my mains earth are roughly 1 meter apart. That surge took out my main desktop computer, a washing machine (singed the dryer where it arced between it and the washer), the toaster oven, a microwave, my NAS, and my router connected to telco. It went two different paths inside the house, along both outside walls, one via mains copper and the other via cat5e copper. That was quite an expensive misadventure.




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