I was there as tech support. The exercise started at 1200 UTC, which was 4 in the morning in San Diego. The exercise ran for 4 days, and the fifth day was a show-and-tell for the VIP like Secretary of the Navy, and the sixth day was for the press.

To set it up, and dry run, the engineers were sent to the bases at Maryland and San Diego a week prior to the exercise started. Everything worked fine during the exercise, so most of the support in Maryland went home. The forth day, when the exercise started, the remaining team in Maryland found out the one of the rugged notebook ran out of battery and rebooted itself after plugged in the power. The notebook had ROM password, and the whole harddisk was encrypted, without password, it won't boot. And no one there remember what the ROM password was. None of us in SD remember that either, so I started calling everyone I could think of who might know the password at 3 o'clock, and even tried to see if anyone knew how to reset it. After two hours, finally someone there remembered the password. The exercise had already started for about an hour, but thank God that our part didn't start until 20 min later. That was very close.