Back in the late 80's, I worked as network admin at a university. Most of the buildings on campus where relatively old, but I only had recurring problems in one of them. The building that held the English and History departments had an Equinox LM-48 in a cabinet in the back of a typing lab. One Monday morning we got a call that no-one in the building could get online. I checked the DS-15 port in the data center, and sure enough, no link, so I walked over to the lab and met the assistant dean who had the keys to let me in. When he unlocked the door, we both knew something was wrong because we could both smell the fried electronics... When I disconnected the LM-48 and picked it up, we could both hear what turned out to be pieces of serial chips rattling around inside the case. I replaced the unit with a spare and took the dead one back to my office. When I opened it up, I could see a couple (don't remember how many) of the chips had been blown up. Looking back, I probably had enough information to determine which PCs weren't grounded by which chips blew up, but that didn't occur to me then. About a month or so later, the same thing happened, but it happened on a week-night and when I heard the thunder, I knew I had just lost the replacement unit. Unfortunatlely, this was at 1am or so and I did not have keys to the English department.... So at 7am the next morning, when the assistant dean showed up, I was sitting outside his office with another replacement. He said something like "...the storm last night..." and I just nodded.
I don't remember the final resolution of the problem, but I do remember that from the 2nd strike until the problem was solved, every time I heard thunder I would run to the English building and with my newly assigned key, run upstairs and disconnect the rj-21 fanout cables. I would then leave a note on the English dept office informing them that they'd need to plug them in the in a.m. One evening, I didn't make it. I heard thunder and bolted for the English dept... I had my key in the buildings' outside door when lightning struck the building...and I knew I was too late. When I got upstairs, I could smell burnt electronics....
Probably at the same time as this was going on for me, my dad, who was a large-scale CSE had similar problems. I don't know how much 16-port line-cards for the system that he was supporting cost, but one day he had to replace eight or nine of them. The next day, UPS delivered two cases of copper-fiber-copper serial surge suppressors and he scheduled to install them. I don't think that site had problems after that.
