OpenBSD Frequently Asked Questions

This FAQ is supplemental documentation to the man pages, which are available both in the installed system and online. It covers the latest release of OpenBSD. There are likely new features and changes in the development version of OpenBSD (-current) that are not covered in the FAQ.

Quick Links:

Introduction to OpenBSD

• About OpenBSD
• Hardware support
• Manual pages
• Mailing lists
• Migrating to OpenBSD
• Reporting bugs
• Supporting the project

Installation Guide

• Overview of the installation procedure
• Pre-installation checklist
• Downloading OpenBSD
• Creating install media
• Performing a simple install
• File sets
• Disk partitioning
• Sending your dmesg after the install
• The ramdisk kernel (bsd.rd)
• Customizing the install process
• Multibooting

System Management

• Security updates
• System daemons
• Executing commands as another user
• Editing the password file
• Using S/Key
• Directory services

Package Management

• Introduction
• Selecting a mirror
• Finding packages
• Installing new packages
• Updating packages
• Removing packages
• Duplicating installed packages on another machine
• Incomplete package installation or removal

Building the System from Source

• OpenBSD's flavors
• Development snapshots
• Building OpenBSD from source
• Making a release
• Building X
• Common problems when compiling
• Miscellaneous questions and tips
• Custom kernels
• Preparing a diff

Disk Setup

• Disks and partitions
• Using fdisk
• Disk labels
• The amd64 boot process
• Soft updates
• Root partition backup (/altroot)
• Duplicating filesystems
• Disk quotas
• Accessing other filesystems
• Mounting disk images
• Growing disk partitions
• RAID and disk encryption

Networking

• Network configuration
• Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol
• Wireless networking
• Setting up a network bridge
• Equal-cost multipath routing
• Networking vmm guests
• Using NFS

Keyboard and Display Controls

• Working on the console
• Consoles on VGA hardware
• Blanking an inactive console
• Configuring a serial console

General Questions

• I forgot my root password
• Using OpenNTPD
• Time zones
• Character sets and localization
• Reverse DNS
• Device "not configured" in dmesg

The X Window System

• Introduction to X
• Configuring X
• Starting X
• Customizing X

Multimedia

• Configuring audio devices
• Playing different kinds of audio
• Playing audio CDs
• Recording audio samples
• Recording a monitor mix of all audio playback
• OpenBSD's audio server (sndiod)
• Debugging audio problems
• Using MIDI instruments
• Playing DVDs
• Burning CDs and DVDs
• Browser plugins (Java and Flash)

PF User's Guide

• Basic configuration
  • Getting started
  • Lists and macros
  • Tables
  • Packet filtering
  • Network Address Translation
  • Traffic redirection (port forwarding)
  • Shortcuts for creating rulesets
• Advanced configuration
  • Runtime options
  • Anchors
  • Address pools and load balancing
  • Packet tagging (policy filtering)
• Additional topics
  • Logging
  • Performance
  • Issues with FTP
  • User shell for authenticating gateways (authpf)
  • Firewall redundancy (CARP and pfsync)
• Example rulesets
  • Building a router

Questions and comments regarding this FAQ may be directed to misc@openbsd.org. General questions about OpenBSD should be directed to the appropriate mailing list.

OpenBSD FAQ Copyright © 1998-2018 OpenBSD

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