We had company over the last week which was nice. We laughed about everything, spent some time on the lake and even had a chance to take them out in the Jeep to climb around the desert for a morning.

We woke up to a rumbling of thunder and lightning one early morning and in a blink of an eye a huge bolt of lightning hit near by and the house went dark for a couple seconds. I was instantly awake and listened patiently for each of my systems to begin their shutdown cycle and send out notifications to my phone.

One message, then another, then another dinged on my phone. It’s a lot scarier than when I simply pulled the plug to test everything. All seemed to be going fine as I watched my phone but I never got the all clear message from the system telling me it was back on line.

Those few minutes seemed to last hours! I had to get up. No way I was going back to sleep.

So even though the spike wreaked havoc on a UPS circuit board, killed a couple batteries and melted the filter stack to the point it was necessary to replace the UPS itself, the system actually did what it was supposed to do. My system was protected, fail-over worked correctly and the FreeNAS file server was isolated to protect itself. All the other systems came up and notifications went zipping to my phone as planned.

Stings a bit to buy another UPS but it’s penny’s compared to replacing my file server or losing 50 TiB of photos, graphics, drawings, and data.