West Tennessee - Blown away!

[q2dude]

Hey guys.. just thought I'd say a little something on the matter:

Monday night, since about ~8PM up until around 12PM (CST/CDT) (with Tornado Warnings lasting for Obion County until 12:15 AM, and Flash Flood / Thunderstorm Warnings lasting until about 4:30 AM I believe it was), we had to endure this wicked storm. Our power was out for nearly 3 hours where I was.

Over in Pemiscot County, MO -- 3 people died, and one went missing I think it was.

I can't recall or even heard of all the damage in other places, except here really.

Just down the road, not but 5 minutes or probably less than that from my house, a mobile home was completely destroyed. Down that road with the destoryed mobile home, and not too far away in Rives, TN, and kinda up town in Union City, TN (all here in Obion County), you'd see pieces of metal, some rather big, off in the fields and off the side of the roads, some right in people's front yards.

Also, when entering Rives that Monday morning, you would have seen a cattle feed thingamabob laying in the ditch, which came from probably a good 30-50 feet or more from the nearby farm. Oh yeah.. inside of Rives though, they had this little gazebo type thing setup at the park, which is now laying on the ground, torn up.. as well as one of the two churches in Rives had one of it's upper windows pulled out and thrown a little ways, breaking some of the different colored glass in it. -- We're told the tornado didn't touch ground, but rather stayed pretty high up, which is why that window was thrown out. (That window was atleast a second story up.)

Several houses, including my neighbors (!!) had to have their roof either patched or have a tarp put over a few parts, since the storm had torn the shingles right off!

Also, my mom told me that when she was going to work the next morning, that she saw this huge piece of metal -- get this -- wrapped around the pole of someone's mailbox!!

They'd had all kinds of Thunderstorm, Tornado, and Flash Flood Warnings going on within just a few hours, and within 11 counties or so!

This thing apparently started in Missouri, and then made its way thru West TN and over a little ways to Middle TN (not a whole lot though), and then I believe went on down to Alabama and Georgia!

It didn't really touch our house here or anything, but man, it got close enough!! Too close!


I've taken a few pictures of the damage, though in the car..so they're certainly not very good.  I can also have a few of the newspaper pictures scanned. (I'd probably need the newspaper's permission first though.. hmm, I'll check into that.) But I can't upload them to my server just yet, since it's been down since Monday night, possibly due to all the power outtages that occurred. (This is also why you're unable to access the Union City, TN mirror for the map pack.. that's hosted on my server that's offline right now.)

[johnny]

Hey, glad to hear you're OK--tornadoes are scary things. I grew up in Illinois, and I remember well that greening of the sky beforehand. One of the most awe-inspiring and frightening things I've ever seen is a tornado ripping through a corn field about half a mile from my house (no doubt in search of the nearest trailer park).

Damn, though--couldn't have done at least a little damage to your cable server, thereby messing up your ping so that I might have a ghost of a chance of fragging you for once?

[q2dude]

I'm on wireless, so..need I say more?

But yeah.. I meant to come back and add to this story:
A tower of my WISP was struck, and had messed up some fibre optic cabling I think..  I was also told it took out a (ethernet?) switch, a phone line, and three of their servers.  My server may also be fried.. not sure. I had the guy check on it, and then later on I recieve an e-mail from him saying that he thinks my ethernet card is messed up and that he's gonna try and replace it for me. I guess tomorrow (Monday) I might find out something. Geez, I atleast hope the HDD is good!

Oh yeah, and this one house out here, my dad said "..it looked the house had just been lifted off the foundation and set back down." And said that the people living there, something like they'd figured out they had an electrical short in their wiring as a result of the storm.. and said the day after the storm (Tuesday), they'd left some lights on and went to town thinking nothing was going to happen ... and come back, to a burned down house. :cry:

God that's gotta suck. :x

[q2dude]

Hey. Just wanted to give an update on my server:

I had a few things to do in town today and so I decided to stop by my WISP and check out my server. (I don't have my license (I know, "poo!"), but my dad had a few things he needed to do as well, and didn't mind dropping me off.)

Well, it would seem that my beloved D-Link DFE-550TX 10/100 PCI NIC (based on the Sundance ST-201 chipset or something like that) is now dead (it does power up, but no matter which slot I plug it in, 'ifconfig' always wants to show "no carrier," and it's Full-Duplex and 100Mbit LEDs just flashing on/off every 3 seconds or so, with the "Link" LED not lighting up at all).. so it's dead, along with the PCI slot it was sitting in, it seems.

I plugged in a D-Link DFE-530TX+ 10/100 PCI NIC that I had sitting around the house (based on a Realtek chipset (I forgot the chipset number hehe)). I tried it out in the same slot as the 550TX, and again, the card wasn't even recognized by the BIOS. Plugged it into the slot below the video card (for console purposes), and the BIOS saw it, as did the OS -- same as with the 550TX, only with this card (that I was pretty sure was good), I was actually able to get online with it. - I was able to ping the gateway it sat behind, as well as ping / traceroute yahoo.com and xquake.net.

So, it's looking like the only things that were damaged, was the network card and the PCI slot it was in. The server is online and completely operational as best I can tell for now, but I'm needing to reconfigure the networking on it just a little, and I'm thinking a kernel recompile may be in order (currently using the GENERIC kernel). Also, I'm having it setup so the server won't be using a private LAN IP, but then also have a public IP forwarded to it - it'll soon just have the public IP setup on it's ethernet interface.

That'll be cool, for me atleast, because then I won't have to add the Apache VHosts to my hosts file on WinXP (since, I have the DNS server on it, setup for the public IP, so everyone else can access it, and me being on the internal network of it with my wireless connection, I couldn't access it's public (external) IP and have it pull up the webpages on it.)

This'll be sorted out in the days to come, so hang tight.

[q2dude]

So I've tidied things up and had my ISP forward the public IP back to my server once again (as I'd figured out last night, that if I were setup the public IP directly on my server, it would no longer be able to see my home router, and thus the VPN/IPSec tunnel idea would no longer be possible).

Only this time, I'm able to access my server via it's public IP, in addition to it's private IP! I've already commented out the line for it's private IP + vhosts in my hosts file, and all appears to be working great!

Also, if someone could test it out for me, just to make sure it's accessible, that would be great..
  maybe see if this works? http://games.darkregion.net/files/xquake

Thanks.

[ĄƦçɧąɳɠҾԼ]

It's accessible, but it's real slow.

[q2dude]

I did have it capped at 80KB/sec, and now I've got it at 40KB/sec. It's still much faster than in-game.

But do you mean it's slower than that?

[ĄƦçɧąɳɠҾԼ]

I meant it was slow to load page in browser, but it seems to be a little quicker today.

[fanny]

Worked fine for me, leveled off at about 48Kbs, thanks

[q2dude]

Ahh. Good.