Who Should Read This Book?

This book is written for an experienced UNIX user or system administrator who is interested in adding OpenBSD mastery to his repertoire. It assumes you're familiar with programs and commands such as tail(1), chmod(1), ping(8), and so on. In many cases we'll discuss programs that you may be familiar with, but might be slightly different on OpenBSD.

For maximum benefit, you should have a system on which to install OpenBSD. OpenBSD will coexist with another operating system, if properly installed. While this is excellent for learning purposes, if you're going to use OpenBSD in a production environment you should dedicate a machine to it. We'll discuss both installation methods. Our installation examples will be written for the i386, or "standard PC," but will work almost identically on any hardware platform. (You may need to look at hardware-specific resources for information on how to handle your hardware, however; for example, the method for booting off of CD-ROM varies from platform to platform.)

Most people think that OpenBSD is not the easiest UNIX-like operating system, or the easiest version of BSD, or even the easiest version of open-source BSD. It doesn't have handy "wizards" that walk you through each stage of the configuration process. It has very few menu-driven front ends. Once you're familiar with how the system works, though, such wizards only get in the way. The OpenBSD developers and support groups are not really interested in helping rank UNIX beginners and usually refuse to answer basic UNIX questions.

To really understand OpenBSD you need to be willing to learn, experiment, and spend some time accumulating understanding. The good news is, OpenBSD merely shows you what other operating systems conceal. Much of this knowledge can be directly applied to other versions of BSD, other UNIX-like operating systems, and even completely foreign operating systems such as Microsoft's Windows platforms.