Chapter 5: Post-Install Setup

Overview

It fills the hard drive,
looking quite dumb and clunky.
Thought you were done? Ha!

So you have OpenBSD installed, you've ejected the install floppy, and you've hit a key to reboot the machine and bring up the operating system for the first time. A bare-bones UNIX system is actually pretty boring; while powerful, it doesn't actually do much of anything. Here are some of the basic steps you should take after an install to establish a firm platform for later work. Any experienced system administrator will want to jump right into things such as correct the system time zone, set a default gateway, install basic mail aliases, and so on. If you know what these basic things are and just want to get your system up and on your network in a hurry, this is for you.

OpenBSD has a general configuration file that controls which of its integrated programs run and how they function. We'll discuss this system, /etc/rc.conf, in some detail.