Contents Overview

Here's a brief description of what you'll find in the next several chapters.

Chapter 1, Additional Information Resources, discusses the system documentation available both in the installed system and on the World Wide Web. You might need this information to complete your installation tasks, so we present it up front.

Chapter 2, Installation Preparations, discusses the steps necessary to install OpenBSD on an i386 (aka "standard PC"). We will discuss both standalone and shared-system installs, as well as some basic tasks you should take care of when you finish the install.

Chapter 3, Installation Walkthrough, carries you through every step of the installation process. While the installer is very simple and powerful, it assumes a certain level of knowledge about computer hardware and about OpenBSD that you may not yet possess. You will get all the skills you need to install OpenBSD here.

Chapter 4, Multiboot Installation, teaches you how to install OpenBSD on a system with another operating system such as Linux, FreeBSD, or any version of Microsoft Windows. With this information, you should be able to install OpenBSD with any operating system of your choice.

Chapter 5, Post-Install Configuration, discusses some of the steps experienced systems administrators probably want to take once after installing an OpenBSD system. We also discuss the main system configuration settings found in /etc/rc.conf.

Chapter 6, System Startup, covers the OpenBSD booting process. The various files used by the booting process are documented, and management of the boot process.

Chapter 7, Managing Users, discusses how to add, remove, and restrict users in OpenBSD, as well as giving them basic privileges with the integrated sudo tool.

Chapter 8, Networking, reviews some of the basics of the Internet standard TCP/IP protocol and cover some of OpenBSD's tools for examining and trouble-shooting the network.

Chapter 9, Network Connections, teaches you how to connect to the Internet via dialup and via Ethernet.

Chapter 10, Additional Security Features, describes general OpenBSD security tools such as securelevels and systrace.

Chapter 11, Basic Kernel Configuration, describes the various tools available to configure your kernel. Unlike many other free UNIX-like operating systems, OpenBSD does not require the administrator to recompile the kernel. Instead, a variety of other tools are available for kernel tweaking.

Chapter 12, Kernel Compilation, discusses how to recompile the kernel in those rare incidents when you must.

Chapter 13, Additional Software, describes OpenBSD's add-on software management tools. We learn how to compile your own software in a manner consistent with OpenBSD's tools and how to check and remove installed software.

Chapter 14, Upgrading OpenBSD, describes the various methods an administrator can use to upgrade an installed OpenBSD system.

Chapter 15, Disks, discusses OpenBSD's disk management systems and routines, including mounting disk images and encrypted file systems.

Chapter 16, /etc, describes each of the major files in /etc that have not been covered earlier in the book and how you might want to use each.

Chapter 17, Packet Filtering, documents OpenBSD's integrated packet filtering engine, PF. We present real-world traffic filtering situations and how they should be handled.

Chapter 18, More Packet Filtering, covers network address translation, bandwidth management, and a variety of other nifty tricks that can the PF engine can perform for you.

Chapter 19, Managing PF, introduces the tools you can use to control the PF system and other tools that work with PF to allow a network administrator a great deal of control over a network.

Appendix A discusses the common kernel features available for x86 (standard PC) hardware.

Finally, Appendix B gives several examples of PF usage in a variety of network types.

Okay, enough boring stuff. On to OpenBSD!