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

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?