Similar experience to being a hacker-cracker 20 yrs ago, bouncing off servers around the world over a modem connection to telnet into some poor SunOS 4 boxes in South Korea or at GSFC (NASA). Sometimes you had to wait minutes before anything appeared on the screen while TCP was doing its thing. God forbid if you accidentally (yp)cat’d some large file..:)

Even on a good console I put a # at the start of the line before editing or typing it in case I accidentally hit Enter too soon.

And never ever paste commands without first trying it into a trash terminal or editor.

That's an interesting technique that I've never heard of. Do you have fast shortcuts/keybindings for removing the # when you are ready, or is it '(left arrow x N) + ^H' each time?

In windows what I do is Home->Delete I am amazed at how useful home, end pgup and pgdown keys are, and I am pretty sure not many people know or use them a lot.

^A ^D

^A ^D it is. But since you bring up moving the cursor, it also is very helpful to 'xset r rate 160 80' to speed it up substantially in Xwindows.

I assume (by trying on zsh) that this is a configuration change you made vs. some keybinding I've yet to discover?

Those are Emacs style keybindings, which are the default on most shells. You've probably switched to Vi style bindings in zsh.

Readline bindings, emacs mode.

Despite (mostly) using vim as an editor, it's got to be emacs on the shell itself.

Use mosh and you will have a much better experience. It's made for high latency connections.

Some mission critical production systems don't really want you installing <insert current trendy software here>. That's probably a highly unpopular view on HN, but having downtime on IceCube, for example, means they may miss an extremely rare event (neutrino hitting something and generating muons/photon shockwaves) that they could detect.

Mosh has been around for a while, it's not like "current trendy software". I thought people use it for bad connections (and envied them because of my stuff in the jungle that isn't performant enough for ssh).

Something released in 2012 isn't exactly what I'd call "trendy". Technically it really does have some improvements for poor latency and high-packetloss connections.

I'm pretty sure they consider everything sub 10 years old "new and untested" in this field, on this server/array.

Indeed. Mosh is still new (less than 10 years old), albeit it could get an exception if it really helps avoiding errors and typos due to latency.

Jusr amoment ago learned about mosh.org that sounds like would be helpful for that kind of situations.

Since you're here! Is Iridium out of your price range, or does even that have latency/bandwidth issues for the kind of SSH work you're talking about?

At least a few years ago, IceCube had it's own Iridium modems, in addition to a small pool of them for the station at large. Latency is very high, bandwidth is very low. It's much better when you can send an email over Iridium to ask for help from a human on the other side, than to SSH and do it yourself.

I think the situation now is a lot better than it was, but a few years ago, most of the day there was no connectivity except Iridium. Most communications satellites are in orbits that don't take them near the poles, with Iridum being the obvious exception.

Related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOES_3 was an amazing piece of the South Pole infrastructure for several years. There was a period every year where the Earth would eclipse GOES-3 - the batteries onboard were long dead - so the satellite would power down and everyone just sorta crossed their fingers and hoped it came back online with the right orientation and with enough electronics going so that we could keep using it. Bandwidth wasn't great, but it was quite reliable especially considering that it was launched in 1978.

iridium is available all the time but very slow and the scarce bandwidth is not prioritized for incidental ssh access. The problem is that there are a lot of people / experiments at Pole.