Jen Thomas

Jen Thomas

Jen Thomas

Jen Thomas

Carles Pina i Estany is not what comes to mind when you picture your typical Polar explorer. A native of sunny Barcelona, he works as a Software Engineer at Mendeley—a London-based technology company owned by science publishers Elsevier. Before this year, he had never even slept aboard a ship. But when the invitation came for him to embark on a three-month expedition around the Antarctic, he jumped at the chance.

It all happened rather quickly. Pina i Estany’s partner, Jen Thomas, who had previously worked with the British Antarctic Survey, was working as Data Manager for a research trip led by the newly created Swiss Polar Institute. The SPI connects researchers active in polar or extreme environments, promotes public awareness of these environments, and facilitates access to research facilities in those extreme environments. Billionaire adventurer Frederik Paulsen sponsored the excursion—he even went along for the ride. This was most definitely not your typical office tech support gig.

Having an IT person onboard (in addition to the two maintenance and electronics engineers) was essential. Luckily, Thomas knew a guy. Suddenly Pina i Estany found himself alongside her aboard the Akademik Tryoshnikov, a research vessel set to undertake an ambitious Antarctic loop via Cape Town in South Africa, Hobart in Tasmania, and Punta Arenas in Chile.

During the IT professional’s short tenure as at-sea support, the Akademik Tryoshnikov pushed through bad weather, dealt with sub-par food, and navigated a telecommunications setup that never seemed to work properly. And while some troubleshooting is to be expected on any such trip, the fact that they’d had such little time to prepare the equipment before setting off presented Pina i Estany with a unique set of challenges right from the get-go. (As he optimistically put it, there were “more opportunities for me to solve things.”)

“I am 35 now, and I have been working with computers for over 20 years—hack days, evenings, weekends, personal projects,” he told Ars. “I tell you, in this expedition I used everything I know, even little bits of knowledge I thought were pretty useless. It all becomes useful in the Antarctic.”

When Pina i Estany’s unusual office time wrapped up this summer and he returned to London in late July, he found time to meet with Ars and regale our inner networking nerd with tales of IT at the high seas. If there’s anything to take away from his experiences, it’s that tech support in the most extreme places in the world isn’t so different from tech support in more familiar settings—that is, except for the lack of reliable connectivity and ability to snag parts and equipment from Amazon or your local shop. But the need for help is constant, the emotions can run high, and requests run the gamut from simple e-mail server stuff to things no computer science curriculum will train you for.

Jen Thomas

Jen Thomas

Jen Thomas

Carles Pina i Estany

Jen Thomas

Carles Pina i Estany

Jen Thomas

Jen Thomas

Jen Thomas

The winch

One evening, about a month after setting sail, a researcher cheerfully approached Pina i Estany with what he called a “new challenge.” Up until then, he dealt with the sort of familiar equipment that was well within his comfort zone: computers, routers, hard drives, and Raspberry Pis.

But this support ticket fell into an entirely different league. A massive winch—which is a hauling mechanism made of a cable and a crank—had started to fail.

Until this point, Pina i Estany didn’t even know what the word “winch” meant (that was about to change, naturally). This particular winch was responsible for lowering the ship’s only CTD device, which collected and analyzed water. The CTD normally would be lowered to depths of up to 1,500 meters, and it proved crucial to most of the 22 separate research teams onboard.

The problem, as it turned out, was a software malfunction. And the error was interfering with the winch’s ability to lower the extensive cabling into the water smoothly. Pina i Estany attempted some debugging, but the manufacturer soon told him that inputting new parameters on the CTD winch computer remotely was impossible. Considering the Akademik Tryoshnikov was in the middle of the ocean, this presented a bit of a problem.

The solution, as it turned out, called for some “semi-hacking skills” in addition to willingness to brave the elements:

“The temperature was around 0 or -2, windy with lots of sea spray; the boat was rocking, and my hands were freezing. People were asking me what I was doing out there with a computer, but the CTD was connected with a very short network cable. So I had to work outside,” he tells me. “So I accessed the winch computer, which operated Windows CE, using my Linux machine. I discovered the IP from the boot screen; using nmap, I found that it had a remote desktop server. I had a moment of joy when I pressed enter and, Yes! I could change the parameters.”

Pina i Estany’s joy was short-lived, sadly; that didn’t quite solve the problem. After the winch manufacturers begrudgingly agreed to let him reinstall the software, he had to wait until they docked at Hobart for resupply in order to download it through the hotel’s Wi-Fi.

“So we reinstalled the software, and it still wouldn’t boot up,” Pina i Estany said. "That was one of the worst moments of the expedition IT-wise. The problem was that the CTD was one of the most essential bits of science equipment onboard, but you know, this is a big winch, and I really had no idea about it... ”

Luckily, this particular story had a happy ending. After reinstalling the update in a different way, the winch finally stopped acting up. Soon enough, all the scientists got their water samples safely collected, and Pina i Estany could finally take his computer back out of the cold.

Listing image by Jen Thomas