Lightning Strike and Dead Polisy

[apostolakisl]

Had what I believe to be a direct strike to the house, though I don't see any physical damage, but we had a flash bang simultaneous and now boat loads of stuff is fried, including my polisy.  Won't power up at all, and yes, I tried multiple power supplies, just nothing, no lights, no sounds.  As coincidence would have it, I already planned on upgrading to eisy and it was already ordered (lucky I didn't order it a week earlier).  Anyway, I have recent backups of ISY, but my backups of PG3 aren't so new.  Was wondering if I opened polisy, is there an sd card that perhaps would boot on eisy to get backups?  Or other solutions?

FYI, list of known "fried"  Mind you, I had whole house surge suppressors on every panel and a lot of this stuff was on a UPS.

Two of 3 HVAC units have fried circuit boards (one unit had outdoor circuit board die and another had indoor unit, so I was able to swap parts and get one of the two back online while waiting for parts).  

Elk M1G

Elk XEP 

? rest of Elk boards, can't test them 

Spectrum modem

Pool Lights

Several Insteon Switches (one of my outdoor switches was behind a popped gfci and when I reset it, the Insteon device literally had something explode inside.  likely a cap)

Luba lawn mower power supply

PS5

Intercom System

Many wall warts

A couple of Security cameras

Netgear switch

GFCI Outlet

Landscape lighting transformer

 . . .Still finding things

Fortunately, all PC's survived as did my Ubiquiti stuff (Dream machine, switches, and several wifi AP's).  Not sure if this is good design by ubiquiti or dumb luck.

 

EDIT:  Opened it up.  See nothing physically wrong.  I see that it has a small solid state SATA drive.  Perhaps this can be plugged into eisy?  Or something else?

Edited Monday at 04:35 PM by apostolakisl

[Guy Lavoie]

49 minutes ago, apostolakisl said:

Was wondering if I opened polisy, is there an sd card that perhaps would boot on eisy to get backups?  Or other solutions?

EDIT:  Opened it up.  See nothing physically wrong.  I see that it has a small solid state SATA drive.  Perhaps this can be plugged into eisy?  Or something else?

You might have better luck connecting the SATA drive to a USB adapter and examining it with a PC, assuming the SATA drive isn't damaged. If you are used to doing things with ssh, scp and such, you might be able to reinstall the generic plugins on your new eisy, and then overwrite them with the files from the Polisy's SATA drive. The installed plugins are in:

/var/polyglot/pg3/ns

Then you'll see a pathname for each plugin, made up of your UUID and polyglot slot number, such as   0029b102618f_2

Of course, the subdirectory name will be different on the eisy (with it's own UUID) but the customized files should all be there, and you'd overwrite the default ones with yours. Then there is any licensing issues to deal with.

I've never tried this, but I'm just giving you some tips to explore.

[larryllix]

1 hour ago, Guy Lavoie said:

You might have better luck connecting the SATA drive to a USB adapter and examining it with a PC, assuming the SATA drive isn't damaged. If you are used to doing things with ssh, scp and such, you might be able to reinstall the generic plugins on your new eisy, and then overwrite them with the files from the Polisy's SATA drive. The installed plugins are in:

/var/polyglot/pg3/ns

Then you'll see a pathname for each plugin, made up of your UUID and polyglot slot number, such as   0029b102618f_2

Of course, the subdirectory name will be different on the eisy (with it's own UUID) but the customized files should all be there, and you'd overwrite the default ones with yours. Then there is any licensing issues to deal with.

I've never tried this, but I'm just giving you some tips to explore.

I don't think the format is readable on the SSD by Windows after imaging the SSD.

OUCH!

[Guy Lavoie]

7 hours ago, larryllix said:

I don't think the format is readable on the SSD by Windows after imaging the SSD.

OUCH!

Alternately, you could try plugging the USB adapter into the eisy and see if it can mount the filesystem.

[larryllix]

9 hours ago, Guy Lavoie said:

Alternately, you could try plugging the USB adapter into the eisy and see if it can mount the filesystem.

I would doubt the minimum freeBSD O/S likely incorporated into eISY would have USB drivers for this, but who knows?

[apostolakisl]

Eisy comes today.  I'll open it up and see if it uses the same msata drives.  If so, I'll try putting the polisy one in and see what happens.  Unless someone thinks it could somehow harm the eisy.

And more fried stuff being found.  Of course my plm is dead.  But a curious one, I have a whole house sound system with 6 controllers that are hard wired back to the main unit.  One of the controllers is dead.  The rest of the system is working normally.  That one controller is in a j-box containing a 2476d switch that is also dead.  The j-box is a split jbox, so the low voltage side is decisively separate from the Insteon swtich side.  Other Insteon switches controlling the same light and using the same hot wire are fine.  How does this happen?  To add the insult, the system I use is no longer made and I can't find any individual controllers on ebay.  And my intercom system isn't made anymore and I can't find those on ebay, but I can't even figure out what is the faulty part(s).

Edited Tuesday at 02:30 PM by apostolakisl

[LFMc]

Sorry to hear about your troubles, that is a mess. Being in Texas (lots of lightning storms) I have learned years ago to always have a isolation transformer on critical equipment with or without UPSes. Surge protectors and even UPSes don't stop a large hit. I have two APC Line-R isolation transformers at critical areas along with a whole house surge in my breaker panel. The weak link on my UDI Easy controller is still the PLM if you put it on the unprotected side of the transformer where it needs to be to work correctly for power line communication. So I just keep a spare around just in case. 

Old story, I put a fully isolated UPS (hard to find now days) on a file server in a bank on a hill next to several radio towers. The bank got hit directly by a massive bolt from the blue. All the electronic equipment in the bank fried, including the ATM. My file server was the only computer to survive. So I do believe in isolation transformers. Cheap insurance.