Hi there,

The God of Thunder (Thor) was in our town last week and it caused a disaster for so many people. Thor or Thors like in this funny commercial must have been very, very angry and thousands of lightning strikes hit the town in a few hours.

Believe it or not I was watching Avengers: Endgame at that right moment and heard a loud POP sound from my xDSL modem router, it exploded and my PC reset with a kernel panic. I immediately turned off the PC and monitor. There was a high pitch noise in the room that was coming from the modem router. Probably high voltage caused a capacitor to explode and others to make loud coil whine. Noise decreased when I unplugged the DSL line RJ11 cable from back of the modem router and it stopped when I unplug its power adapter. Then I turned off the power strip that PC, monitor and all of my devices plugged in as Thors keep feeding those lightning strikes.

In the morning I turned on the PC, hoping it works, fingers crossed and yes it turned on and booted macOS with kernel panic log. The log was mentioning CPU related entries. And my ethernet controller was gone. No name, no MAC address, nothing. Checked Hackintool and my ethernet kext wasn't loaded. OC probably doesn't load any kexts if it doesn't find the hardware.

So, I'm kind of lucky that the lightning strike only fried my modem router and ethernet controller on the mainboard. Glad to have gaming board though, they have lots of protections and it saved other components from getting damaged. My neighbors weren't that lucky though. One of the lightning strikes hit my neighbor's satellite dish, went through the cable and fried their receivers, TVs and other devices and even appliances. It jumped from satellite dish to telco wall box in neighbor's building and went through phone cable to hit my modem router (Jeez Murphy!). My cable comes from that box too.

I know it's recommended to unplug power cords when there is a thunderstorm but who unplugs sat tv cable from their receiver and phone/dsl cable from the modem router, right?

Concerns and Questions

Since my ethernet has gone, I don't know what will happen to the iServices I set it up with ethernet ROM, en0. Now it works fine with WiFi so far but I'll get a new modem router soon and will use ethernet.

My monitor Dell Ultrasharp has ethernet port too with its USB hub and I connected the hub with TypeC cable. macOS sees it as an USB ethernet and it got en3 BSD. en1 is my BCM WiFi card.

1. Do you think it will cause any issues with iServices when I connect ethernet cable to the monitor? en0 is attached to my fried ethernet controller's MAC address which is used for ROM in SMBIOS by the guide.
2. There is a macOS update now, how will macOS react to it? Do you think either plugged in to monitor's ethernet port or without it using WiFi will cause any issues when updating?

Thanks!

Edit: My specs and details here in this post. It's an old post before OC but the h/w is the same.