Clueless Field Service

You haven't seen how dirty the power is down there. Officially, the power grid ground was a busted tractor on the end of a cable, pushed into the bay. Unofficially, I was told that the station's phone system acted as a sort of ground web. At McMurdo, there are several diesel generators, most of which were working at any given moment. It took four turning in the summer when the demand was highest. We used to get frequent brownouts in the summer time with the occasional station-wide blackout. Yes, there are more lights on in the winter, but in the summer, all the buildings are open and all have furnace blowers and computers and office lights, etc. Stuff would break mysteriously; UPSes would mysteriously melt down. At the South Pole station, the clocks didn't keep proper time because the frequency wasn't exactly 60 Hz. Be glad for your local power grid. We had no such luxury. ObClassicCmp: Until 1996, the primary and secondary DNS servers at McMurdo were a pair of uVAXen running VMS. They had the advantage of being unlikely to be cracked. It was their only advantage. :-)