Nat Friedman Quotes

There are considerable advantages to using many degrees of freedom to store information, stability and controllability being perhaps the most important.

I don't have any authority over Linux other than this notion that I know what I'm doing.

As companies move to web-based computing they get a lot more servers, which are difficult to manage and control. All kinds of problems can arise - security, quality and worms.

We've announced an Oracle Virtual Compute Appliance, a bunch of low-cost commodity servers running Linux, integrated in our case, with InfiniBand - connected with InfiniBand vs. the traditional Ethernet.

Red Carpet Enterprise has been really well received since one guy can install it in about an hour, and it makes it trivial to deal with software management issues like deploying updates and creating standard package sets for your various machines.

I work on OpenBSD fulltime, as the project leader. I set some directions, increase communication between the developers, and try to be involved in nearly every aspect of the base system.

UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.

New security loopholes are constantly popping up because of wireless networking. The cat-and-mouse game between hackers and system administrators is still in full swing.

I'm a technical manager, but I don't have to take care of people. I only have to worry about technology itself.

If you don't fix latent failures in your system, you're asking for trouble.

I very seldom worry about other systems. I concentrate pretty fully on just making Linux the best I can.

This is the system that we have. I didn’t make the system. This is the system that we have.

I had so much fun in early days learning about networking, security, scalability and other geeky stuff.

Corporations want stable, reliable, and easy-to-maintain systems.

Ninety percent of cyber security companies begin in the detection stage. The issue is there are so many applications and alarming messages it is difficult for the user or the administrator to manage.

A system must be managed. It will not manage itself.

You have to manage a system. The system doesn't manage itself.

I'm a big non-believer in manual driver and kernel configuration, be it visual or not.

Management's job is to optimize the whole system.

The fact that ACPI was designed by a group of monkeys high on LSD, and is some of the worst designs in the industry obviously makes running it at any point pretty damn ugly.

I think Unix is a great system - especially for running data centers - because it is very mature, very reliable, very scalable. But when I want to go out and populate small devices, I think Java.

I would therefore like to posit that computing's central challenge, how not to make a mess of it, has not yet been met.

So when they say I'm a low-level systems administrator, that I don't know what I'm talking about, I'd say it's somewhat misleading.

Perl has a long tradition of working around compilers.

I never got into Linux. I swear to God, it's only lack of time. I'm past the years of my life where I can really dig into something like running a Linux system. I'm very sympathetic to the whole idea; Linux people always think the way I want to think.