Being Enron's SysAdmin

CowboyRobot writes "FreeBSD's Kirk McKusick has a long interview with Enron's former SysAdmin, Jarod Jenson, where he describes the nuts and bolts of working in and managing such a large-scale operation." From the article: "EnronOnline was a Web-based trading application. We had several hundred, even thousands of commodities that we would price in realtime, the same way that equities are priced. We were trying to push realtime pricing information out to clients who could do instantaneous transactions on them. People who are familiar with financial markets--the commodity markets--would recognize EnronOnline as sort of the same thing. We had a lot of the same issues that the markets had trying to push out realtime data--not only within our local network but also to the customers--as quickly as we could globally, and trying to make sure that what every trader saw on the screen matched what every company in the world had on theirs."

Comments

Would you trust someone...

[xmedar]

... whos "printer freindly" webpage ends as -

KM

In terms of performance mistakes, the operations guy says it's the developer's fault, the developer says it's the operations guy's fault. Whose fault is it?

JJ

whereas the non-"printer freindly" version continues with the interview, this is why I don't join the ACM, they can't even take 9 seperate pages and format them to be printed, I now re-christen the ACM - ABM, Association of Broken Minds.

Enron didn't hurt him

[TubeSteak]

Since I know a lot of you aren't going to RTFA

After the collapse of Enron, Jenson worked briefly for UBS Warburg Energy before setting up his own consulting company.

It's good to see that his life didn't get fscked up by the Enron blowout.

Enron the company was doing lots of good and innovative things in the marketplace as TFA shows. It was certain groups of people that drove the company into the ground.

Ad

[killerdark]

The article sounds like a consultant who is in dire need of work and does the ultimate desperate action, getting free ad time on /. His story sounds like a fairy tale. Not like the life of a system administrator.

Enron - lessons in what NOT to do

[queenb**ch]

Frankly, all of my contact with Enron has shaped my opinion as such that if I had worked at Enron, I'd be reluctant to put it on my resume. I'd rather have a sabattical in Tibet, stay in rehab, or time in the peace core on there instead. Much of the criminal activity at Enron was IT-based. When your accouting system is an application, your IT had to know that the books were being cooked. The fact of the matter is that they chose not to report it. Instead,a lowly bean counter blew the whistle on all of them. Now that I know that this man has come out and proudly announced that he was part of such an organization, I would seriously recommend that he not be hired for any kind of a position of trust. I don't see a lot here to be proud of, ethically or morally.

Anyone who's been an SA for any length of time knows that being an SA carries an ethical and moral burden. Just because you accidentally read an email while trying to fix something on the mail server doesn't mean you can go gossip about it. If you happen to see a file that has private contents on someone's desktop, you don't go gossip about it. If you happen to find kiddie porn, you inform the FBI. There are rules to this business. Annoucing that you've violated the most important ones doesn't exactly make you a desirable candidate.

How can anyone, who claims to be providing web services for "the public", tie themselves to an IE/Windows/Active X architecture? I work for a university and, while our web traffic is quite atypical, IE accounts for only 1/2 of our traffic and has for some time. Windows only accounts for about 60% of our operating systems. Since we seem to "lead the curve" on rest of the net, I would suspect that in the next year or two most sites, at least ones that take international traffic, will start seeing a similar shift in their traffic.

The whole paradigm of web services is that it's supposed to work on any OS, any browser, etc. without the need for any specific client software. If you're web application isn't browser/OS agnostic, you've totally missed the boat. Frankly that's not anything to be bragging about technically either.

So, to sum it all up. He's bragging about being part of an ethically corrput and technically deficient company and wondering why he's not got a job.

2 cents,

Queen B

Re:Enron - lessons in what NOT to do

[XorNand]

Much of the criminal activity at Enron was IT-based. When your accouting system is an application, your IT had to know that the books were being cooked.

That's a pretty ignorant assumption. I dunno about everyone else, but as a systems dude, I don't even know how to use some of the applications I support. The network support guys are even further removed. Is a drunk's car mechanic liable if after a bender, he runs down a few kids?

An old story: You have to know what to measure

[rfc1394]

Some of his comments about benchmarks and measuring performance bottlenecks go back decades to some comments I've seen time and time again. You have to know what you are measuring in order to know how to measure your performance. If you don't know what you are measuring, you're not going to get useful information.

His points about 'taking ownership' of the problem appear to be spot-on right, when people take ownership of a problem it provides a better chance to solve the problem. This comes straight out of the book In Search of Excellence as a method of building a better company. Difficulties and loss of effort happen when the general environment is one of "it's not my problem." When one takes ownership of problems in order to fix them no matter where the actual problem is you can produce excellent results. But again, if you're not looking in the right place to find the solution, chances are you won't find it.