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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."
I wonder if EnronOnline had realtime showing of the stockholders assets flying out the window.
"rm -rf /" on everyone's machines.
Very interesting discussion about the relationship between developers and admins in TFA. My own take is that it's basically the only useful thing that team leads or managers can do anything about by setting the incentive structure for both to be somewhat similar.
Essentially, if a developer's job relies on the same thing that an admin's job relies on (that is, stable, secure and reliable operations) then you have the foundation for harmony. If a developer's job relies on features and new functionality at the expense of stability, security and reliability, you have a recipe for hostility.
You can tell the priorities at a company by how cranky its admins are.
On the other hand, admins need to be open and available to developers, offering advice on OS, hardware, infrastructure, etc. and be able to clearly define the requirements for SSR so that any new designs or requirements can be supported from day 1.
Oh, and a great way to get documentation from developers: give all their cell#s to the admins, so when something breaks at 3am on a sunday and there's no documentation, the admin has a little company. A few calls like that and developers can write some pretty handy documentation!