First Time - General Configuration Aids

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Configuring Removable Storage Devices
• The File System Table (/etc/fstab)
• Mount Points for Removable Media (nodes)
• Example CDs, and SCSI
• The Mount Points / nodes
• Manually Testing for a Connection
• Updating the File System Table
  
• Package Management - adding programs
• Example: Installing a nice little editor
• Example: Installing Bash 2 - local
• Example: Installing Bash 2 - ftp
• Example: Don't know the package or ftp directory ?
• User Administration
• Adding a New User
• Specifying root access privileges
• Changing details of a User
• Shell Profile (bash example)
• Afterboot Install
  • Date. Setting the Date & Time
  • TimeZone. Setting the Time Zone
  • Network. Setting the basic network services.
  • host configuration,
  • network interface configuration, and
  • network routing.
  • Daily, Weekly, Monthly Scripts
  • Root Backup
  • Cron - scheduled commands
• Miscellaneous
• Making it easier to find files
• Booting in Single User Mode
• Moving Directories Safely
• General Tools I install
• Author and Copyright

Introduction

[ref: http://andrsn.stanford.edu/FreeBSD/newuser.html]

The installation instructions that comes with OpenBSD is pretty much straight forward. If you bought the CD then it will be a nicely printed CD sleeve, clear instructions. If you've downloaded the files from the Internet then read the INSTALL.$ARCH file (for example if you are installing it on an Intel class machine, then the file to read is INSTALL.386)

Outlined here are additional installation items that is likely to be helpful for someone new to OS installations or has come from another Unix. For those really new to Unix I suggest you read the complete section you are interested in before attempting to follow the instructions.

Warning: If you are not familiar with using the vi text editor, or similar variants on unix (ex, view) I would suggest that it will make life much easier for you if you find a tutorial on "vi" somewhere on the 'net and get familiar. Most things in Unix requires editing text files, and it takes a while to get a graphical system up and running so editing usually requires a character based editor (like vi).

There is a real nice introductory, short, tutorial for those totally new to Unix at http://andrsn.stanford.edu/FreeBSD/newuser.html You should at least read through the tutorial for a guide to what you will do here (and reference.)

For the 1st time installer, I suggest either installing from a CD or by downloading the main installation files onto a local network machine or local hard-disk. Of course you can burn your own CD after downloading, at this stage it just wont be bootable but it can be easier to use?

Configuring Removable Storage Devices

(e.g. CD Drives, Zip Drives, etc.)

[Configuration in /etc/fstab]
[Ref: mount(8) mount file systems;
        mount_msdos(8) mount an MS-DOS file system,
        mount_cd9660(8) mount an ISO-9660 filesystem]
[Ref: fstab(5) - static information about the filesystems]

To simplify my installation process (low bandwidth people) I need to configure access to my CD-ROM drive. Use dmesg | less to look for the device name detected as the cdrom drive. CD drives are often detected as device cd# (like cd0 or cd1). 'dmesg' is a command-line program in OpenBSD that lists boot-time information (such as what OpenBSD detects as devices on your system during startup.) less is another command-line program, this program lets you browse through a file by using space (next page) up-arrow, down-arrow, and "q" for quit.

The File System Table

I edit the /etc/fstab file to tell OpenBSD that I have the cdrom drive setup and this helps simplify my mounting command. The /etc/fstab file contains information about the filesystem.

File: /etc/fstab

The general format, as show above, is:

The device, is obviously the disk device we want to mount. The mount-point refers to where on our filesystem we wish to 'mount' the device. The filesystem type refers to what file-system mount will use to mount the device. The list of supported file-systems are available from fstab(5). The mnt-options refers to whether we wish to automatically mount the file system on startup (auto or noauto) and whether the device will be read-write, or read-only. The check-priority field is used by dump and fsck. Keep at zero for removable devices unless you know something other than I do.

Although the CDROM device is detected by the kernel during each boot, and during installation the device is not automatically configured for use. I have also included above how to configure floppy disk access (assuming /dev/fd0 is the controller and /dev/fd0a is the a drive.) I specify msdos file format since I mostly work with msdos floppy drives (Winx) and have no need to transfer any other format floppies.

Mount Points for Removable Media (nodes)

I now create the nodes (mount points) for where the file systems can be mounted by issuing the following commands:

I can now access the CD-ROM drive by entering the below command at the system prompt.

Note that you will receive a read error if a CD is not in the drive. This is because mount doesn't actually configure the device, but attempts to find the file-system on the device, and mount the filesystem. To correctly mount on any device, we require a valid file-system on that device.

Similarly you can access the floppy drive. I've selected the above mounting location (/mnt) because I have a background in RedHat Linux distributions and am used to this convention, whereas some BSD documentations I have read prefer the /cdrom layout.

Example : CDs, and SCSI

[Reference System: iwill motherboard with ATAPI IDE CD, SCSI CDR and SCSI Zip drive]

dmesg outputs a lot of junk with the below information included that seems valid for removable drives.

The command "dmesg | less" lets us navigate up and down the list (using arrow keys) and I can quit "less" by typing in "q" to quit.

The Mount Points / nodes

I test the ability to access the devices by first creating the 'node' or directory to mount the devices and using the mount command to check where the device 'special' is located.

We're choosing cd9660 as the filesystem for CD drives as this is OpenBSD's name for ISO-9660 CDROM filesystem. We use msdos in this example since all my other machines sharing zip disks and floppies are MSWin platforms which share MSDOS FAT filesystems (fat16, fat32).

Manually Testing for a Connection

We start looking at the devices from /dev/???a ... b ... c ... until we find it. Where ??? is the device we are reviewing. We need to make sure we have a valid media (disk) inside each drive for the mount process to find the file-system on the disk we want to mount. Put a CD into the CD Drive and/or floppies into floppy etc. We use the "-v" option so we can get some debugging information from the mount command.

The above three devices seemed to work easily with the first 'device' but the mounted zip took a little while longer to find as shown with the testing below.

Updating the File System Table

We now know where the devices can be located and can confidently specify our devices into the /etc/fstab file system table.

Edit the file: /etc/fstab

Now, all we need to do to access one of the devices above is to use "mount /mnt/????" (where ???? is the directory created above) and mount will look up the device setting/file system from the /etc/fstab file.

As an extra note for those sharing files with the FAT file system you may be interested in reading the mount_msdos man pages for more information about support for long filenames.

Package Management - adding programs

[Utility: pkg_add, pkg_info, pkg_delete ]
[Config location: /usr/src ]

[ref: OpenBSD FAQ - Section 8]

OpenBSD stores binary executables in what is termed 'packages.' These packages store the information required to safely install the binaries, libraries, and documentation distributed for that program. Packages are generally pre-compiled binaries configured for the OpenBSD disk layout and database of installed software. The benefits of packages include resolving dependencies (on other libraries and applications.)

Three utilities are used for administration (adding [pkg_add], deleting [pkg_delete], and query [pkg_info])

For those new to packages (like me) I change to the directory containing the packages before using pkg_add (this is not necessary and is explained later in setting environment variables for bash, my preferred shell.)

The general format for using pkg_add is:

The –v option is Verbose, which is real helpful in providing visual feedback of files it is processing. After you figure out how things work, you can leave the "-v" off.

Example - Installing pico, a nice little editor

[package: pico-4.33.tgz]

If you are uncomfortable with "vi" or the standard text editors found on OpenBSD, then I suggest that you download the pico package and follow the installation process below to simplify some of the editing work that will be required in configuring your OpenBSD server.

Information for pico-4.33.tgz:

In the above example we're just using a location /usr/packages to keep packages. We go into this directory and copy into it the pico-4.33.tgz file and then query the package to tell us what it contains (by using pkg_info.) To install the package we can simply use pkg_add.

pkg_add will decompress the file into a temporary location (/var/tmp/## above)

By using the "-v" verbose display, we can tell the binary /usr/local/bin/pico has been installed and the man page placed /usr/local/man/man1/pico.1

If you've ever used "pine" as an e-mail manager then pico will be a quick and easy editor to learn and use. Make sure you read the man page for command-line options, especially the "-w" command line option to turn off auto-wordwrap. 'pico -w file' is a quick and easy editor for Unix.

Example - Installing Bash 2

[package: bash-2.04-static.tgz]

[config file: /etc/shells]

This is an example of an installation that requires further work after the binaries have been installed. This example assumes the package file can be found on a mounted OpenBSD cd at /mnt/cdrom.

For your reference: There is a reason we choose the 'static' version of bash, as opposed to other versions of bash.

Notice how binary (./bin), man pages have been installed, together with info files and more documentation at the shown location /usr/local/share/doc/bash.

If a package (like bash) gives you further instructions for completing the installation, make sure you follow the instructions. For example, the bash pkg_add tells us to update the /etc/shells file to include bash as a valid login shell.

Edit the file: /etc/shells

Include the above line (/usr/local/bin/bash) into the /etc/shells file.

Example - Installing Bash 2 - ftp

For those without the release CDs, performing a pkg_add from an ftp connection is no more difficult than the above, as shown in the below example for installing the same package.

I have downloaded the bash package from the Internet and have it on my intranet ftp site: 192.168.101.77

pkg_add uses ftp to retrieve from my internal ftp site (192.168.101.77) the requested package and then extracts the files as per the same operation above. You can replace 192.168.101.77 with any valid ftp site which holds the package you wish to install.

Example - Don't know the package or ftp directory ?

If you do not know what the package name is, or the specific directory the file is located, you can still perform an ftp pkg_add. Try using the get filename "| command " sequence as shown in the below example. (note: I am connecting here to an internal site with the OpenBSD files, connect to some other site)

User Administration

[ref: adduser(8), group(8), rmuser(8)]
[Config info: user-name, account-type]

From the man pages:

The first thing that OpenBSD warns of when you login is, do not login as root but use su. This is saying that you should create a user who can use su (the Switch User program) to change to the "root" user when you want to perform administration tasks.

The following instructions guide you through the creation of a new user with SuperUser access privileges.

OpenBSD supplies the adduser script to simplify adding new users. All you have to know to create a new user is the name of the person, and what you want the login account name to be.

The adduser script is started at the command prompt.

When first started, queries you to set or change the default settings. Once the standard configuration has been set, it will continue by prompting for adding new users.

Adding a New User

adduser support two flags -silent or -verbose. You don't really need to know these at the beginning, but you can check the details in the man pages. Read through the example below and then start adduser to create your new account with root access privileges.

The shell is your command line interpreter. It reads in the commands you type and tries to decipher them. There are several different shells to choose from. If bash does not show on the screen, then review adding packages in the previous section. You can change your settings at a later time so do not worry if some settings are not as you want them right now. The documentation that comes with OpenBSD says that 'most people' use bash, strange how they don't make it the default though.

The uid is the User ID number that the system uses to keep track of people. These should be unique on the system. Use the default values offered by the program unless you have good knowledge of previously granted ID numbers.

The login class allows you to set up resource limits for groups of users.

Specifying root access privileges

Important: Your administrator account should be a member of the group wheel. Regular users of your host should not be members of the wheel group. If this is your 1st account for the machine (and presumably your account) then I suggest you add the account to the group "wheel."

Login groups are used to divide security privileges by account groups. The group 'wheel' is generally used for administrators with special privileges including the ability to su (switch user) to the SuperUser. Accounts who are not members of the group 'wheel' cannot gain root access remotely. Invite user accounts you wish to grant special security rights into the group 'wheel,' or create a separate security group for people who need to work together.

Do not group normal users into wheel.

You will be asked for the user's password twice and it will not be displayed. Afterwards, it will display all of the user's information and ask if it is correct.

If you make a mistake, you can start over, or its possible to correct most of this information using the 'chpass' command (discussed below).

[ref: What to do AFTER you have BSD installed by Chris Coleman, http://www.daemonnews.org/200005/chrisc@daemonnews.org

Changing User Information

[ref: chpass(1), vipw(8)]

Once you've configured the base system for working, we can look at basic configuration of users. Note, for those with some previous Unix experience, Do not just edit /etc/passwd or /etc/Master.passwd

Use the chpass utility when adding or changing user information. If you try to modify the user shell selection manually (by changing /etc/passwd) it wont work, trust me I've made this mistake for weeks before I found out my errorneous ways.

Entered at the command line without a parameter (ie. typed by itself,) chpass will edit your personal information. As root, you can use it to modify any user account on the system. You can find more details on chpass in the man pages, but let's go through an example review of the account we created above.

This will bring up information about the user 'bricker' in the 'vi' editor. The password line is encrypted, so don't change it. If you want to disable the user, one method would be to add a # at the beginning of the password string, so you can easily remove it later when you want to reactivate the user. There are methods of disabling user that may be better though.

Remember your vi commands ? :q (colon+q) quit, :w (colon+w) write, :q! (colon+q+exlamation-mark) quit without saving. If you're still having problems, remember the tutorial http://www.freebsd.org/tutorials/new-users

[ref: What to do AFTER you have BSD installed by Chris Coleman,http://www.daemonnews.org/200005/chrisc@daemonnews.org]

Shell Profile (example)

Files: .bash_profile, and .bashrc

Since I like using the Bash shell largely due to my ignorance about the other shells, here is an example of the files for initialisation. The two user files which contain the shell settings are ~/.bash_profile, and ~/.bashrc.

Note that these are templates and there are some things that MUST be changed. I've put [path-to-….] as designators of specific paths that have to be set by the user/admin.

File: ~/.bash_profile

File: ~/.bashrc

The tilde ~ is used here to refer to the home directory of the current user. Therefore if you are logged in as 'bricker' then typing in cd ~ should put you in the directory /home/bricker. Likewise if you edit the file ~/.bash_profile the file is actually created as /home/bricker/.bash_profile. If you were to su (switch user) to root and then type cd ~ you should be moved to /root the home directory for root.

Afterboot Settings

The afterboot man pages list a sequence of issues to review after the OpenBSD system has been configured and is up and running. For the 'expert' practioner many of the items seem trivial, for us newbies it is a good time to review basic skills that will be re-used often and will probably minimise problems that would otherwise occur just from not checking 'basic' items.

afterboot is a serious document if you want to ensure the stability of your system. I recommend you read the document anyway and use these pages as supportive material where possible. These notes are supportive of afterboot material.

Date - Setting the System Date

You can check and configure the system date using the date command. Without parameters, date command will display the current system date. You can set the date by using the following template

date YYYYMMDDHHMM

Where YYYY is the four digit year, followed by MM a two digit month of the year, DD a two digit date of the month, HH a two digit (24 hour) representation of the hour, and MM for the minute in the hour.

Using the above specification, we can set (as per man afterboot example)

Set the current date to January 27th, 1999 3:04pm.

For those new to the convention used above (YYYYMMDDHHMM) it is the ANSI specified date format for SQL. I also prefer the above date formatting as it is less confusing when sharing things with the Americans 8-)

TimeZone - Specifying the Time Zone

The time zone information is recorded as data files under the /usr/share/zoneinfo directory. So if I want to set the timezone to Paris, France then I can look it up using "find / -name "Paris" -print" and I can specify the zone file by typing in:

Of course for us people in Tonga with UTC+13 we use ln -fs /usr/share/zoneinfo/Pacific/Tongatapu /etc/localtime (I thought you might just want to know that ?)

Checking the Network Base Services

Basic services for connecting on the network are generally covered by these three items.

• host configuration,
• network interface configuration, and
• network routing.

Host configuration details

Files: /etc/hosts, /etc/myname

For many network services to function they need to determine the name of the current host. Host Details are checked by using the hostname command. hostname will display what your current host name is. If you need to change the hostname more details are available in the hostname(1) man page. If you change the hostname, then you need to also make the change to /etc/myname and possibly /etc/hosts.

/etc/hosts is a text file listing IP addresses and their related hostnames. Your hostname should be in this file associated with the IP address which you assigned your host during installation.

/etc/myname is a text file with just one line containing the hostname of your machine.

Network interface configuration

Network interfaces are necessary if you wish to communicate to other computers (at least if you want to communicate using the standard tools.) In most cases the network interface device will be an ethernet card. To list the network devices recognised by your system we use the ifconfig -a command.

The ifconfig -a command will list the network interfaces currently active on the system. This will let you review what the system knows of itself during this instance. You can set the default configurations by editing the /etc/hostname.* file that corresponds to the network interface.

If the ifconfig -a command lists an interface le0 than the corresponding hostname file will be /etc/hostname.le0

Example: ifconfig -a displays the following ethernet device on my compaq with a HP network card.

The related hostname file is /etc/hostname.le1 which contains the lines

You can see that the inet line in hostname.le1 corresponds to the inet line displayed by ifconfig -a. ifconfig allows you to manually configure the network card, or at least check different configurations before you insert the details into the hostname.interface file. Details for configuring the network card are read from the /etc/hostname.interface file during the boot sequence.

An example output for the loopback device will look like:

If you have other network interfaces (example a ppp connection) then these will also be listed. Check the afterboot and ifconfig pages for more details.

The inet line specifies IPv4 information whereas the inet6 line specifies IPv6 information. Since OpenBSD is an early adopter of IPv6 you will see this additional information for many network devices.

Routing Configuration

We can check the network routing using netstat -r -n

If you are new to Unix, then just check to make sure the IP address you specified specified for your host is listed and take a note that the IP range (class) is gatewayed through the interface.

In the above example all 192.168.101/24 destinations (except for my host ip address 192.168.101.130 nor the broadcast address 192.168.101.255) are sent through link#1 which is my network inteface le1 [note: I need to verify more of this detail]

As I have an alias to the 207.124.66.156 the 207.124.66/24 destinations are also sent through link#1 (except for the host alias 207.124.66.156 [note: I need to verify more of this detail]

The default gateway address is stored in the /etc/mygate file. If you need to edit this file, a painless way to reconfigure the network afterwards is route flush followed by a sh -x /etc/netstart command. Or, you may prefer to manually configure using a series of route add and route delete commands (see route(8))

# route flush

# sh -x /etc/netstart

Daily, Weekly, Monthly Scripts

Actions that are scheduled to occur in a repetitive pattern such as once each day, each week, each month can be placed into the /etc/daily.local /etc/weekly.local /etc/monthly.local scripts.

The OpenBSD installation supplies a set of standard /etc/daily, /etc/weekly, and /etc/monthly scripts. The scripts will check for daily.local, weekly.local, and monthly.local so you should specify your scripts as part of one of the above *.local files.

Finding and locating files. One of the more frequently asked questions is how to find a file. The /etc/weekly script updates (on a weekly basis) the locate.db file to index files on your system. To manually execute the db update, see the notes below.

To manually execute any of the above scripts, they are sh shell scripts, then use one of the examples below

# sh /etc/daily
# sh /etc/weekly
# sh /etc/monthly

Miscellaneous ?

Making it easier to find files

[ref: locate(8) - find filenames quickly]
[ref: locate.updatedb(1) - update locate database]
[ref: find(1) - walk a file hierarchy]

Unix has a nice file indexing utility accessible through 'locate.' The locate program interrogates a database created by locate.updatedb, in this manner you do not have to traverse the hard-disk each time you want to find a file. Update the file/location database by using the locate.updatedb program and then interrogate (search in) the database by using locate. Start locate.updatedb.

Now you can use 'locate filename' to find exactly where that file is. As locate.updatedb updates information in the locate database dependent on the user starting the program there is a potential risk (since root has access to all files) of listing files in the database that you do not want other users to be aware of.

To be safe, you could just manually start the /etc/weekly script which is configured to execute locate.updated as user "nobody" without the access priviliges available to root:

Using the above weekly script is simpler than trying to figure out how su, nice interact to minimise security holes through the locate db.

Otherwise you can still use the Unix 'find / -name "filename"' command

Booting in Single User Mode

[ref: FAQ. 14.0 Disk Setup]

Booting the system in Single User Mode is an important option when you need to perform tasks on the machine that is sensitive to other user activities on the system. Of course, you could be just like me and have forgotten root's password or have zapped the shell you used for root and other accounts and need to dive back into root to fix the system.

When your system starts up, it momentarily offers the boot> prompt where we can force single user mode.

Assuming you performed the above steps correctly and nothing has gone wrong you should end up at a prompt asking you for a shell path or press return. Press return to use sh.

The single user mode starts with the "/" partition. This partition has been mounted as read only (precautionary procedure). It is advisable at this point to perform a file system check on the "/" partition.

After the fsck we want to remount root in r/w mode as opposed to read only. Issue the following command:

The "-u" flag allows us to change the status of an already mounted file system (because "/" was previously mounted by the startup. The "-w" flag tells mount to make "/" read-write.

Once you have mounted "/" as read/write you can also mount the rest of your file system or just do what it is you want to do in single user mode and restart the system.

Moving Directories Safely

Problem: How can I safely move all files/directories under /opt to /home/opt ?

Sooner or later you'll come across the problem of running out of disk-space on your partition scheme. The following is a set of methods for 'safely' moving files from one folder to another.

For this example we will pretend that our /opt directory has just filled our / partition and we need to move files from /opt to a less congested partition (or a new drive) so we can continue developing ('acking'.) We find that /usr is getting tight on space and /home has heaps of space (cause we have no users yet,) so we will move the files to /home/opt for the time-being.

Option 1: [ref: OpenBSD FAQ and e-mail by Håkan Olsson ]

If the 'find' is run on the locally mounted filesystem, this is a rather efficient method to copy the data. Also, if you move lots of data and there is the chance it may change during copy/move time (say user or project data on an NFS-exported partition), you can rerun once without the 'u' flag to cpio, in which case only updated files are copied, if any. Not foolproof certainly, but often good enough if you have sane time in your network (ntp, et al).

-xdev (x: do not search directories on other file systems/devices, d: depth-first traversal; e:

Option 2: [ref: e-mail by Christopher Linn ]

This would be if you have any other partitions mounted inside of /usr, you don't want tar to cross filesystem boundary

Option 3: [ref: e-mail by Dan Harnett ]

It has been my experience that it is safer and more reliable.

[ref: OpenBSD FAQ. 14.0 Disk Setup -> 14.3 Adding Extra Disks in OpenBSD]
Note: the use of the above names in no way implies these people want to be associated with this information release

My Selection of Tools for Configuring OpenBSD

The OpenBSD base install has a number of standard features (web server etc.) Below is just a list of tools that I used on a consistent basis to be installing with each generic install I put together.

Around the time of OpenBSD 2.8 was the release of the pico editor. I have a friend who lives on the pico editor so now I've come to install this package as well. The user interface is much nicer than vi, but there are some 'gotchas' as well, but to each their own favourite.

The reason we choose to use the 'static' version of bash is because of the times when you may choose to have bash as the default shell for root. By using the static version of bash there is no need for the binary to lookup libraries to complete its task. This is very important when someone or some program may inadvertently (by mistake?) delete or update a library that the dynamically linked version of Bash may need. Also, when booting into single-user mode, not all libraries are immediately available depending on how your partitions are set (remember that in single-user mode only your "/" partition is immediately available.) This also means that you have to make sure your 'bash' executable is in the "/" partition.

Available from ftp sites (& distfiles)

Documentation? Linux has the LDP, OpenBSD has the man pages. Although the LDP are much nicer in hand holding, OpenBSD's man pages are so convenient for us who are not 'live' on the NET. INSTALL.386 has a section "Using online OpenBSD documentation," scan through it if you are new to Unix, it has some helpful pointers on how to better make use of man pages.

The initial purpose of this documentation was to record what I had to do to get OpenBSD into a workable configuration. A few of my friends wanted to try out Unix so here evolves my notes for my better understanding and for others new to OpenBSD.

http://wks.uts.ohio-state.edu/unix_course/unix.html

Author and Copyright

Copyright (c) 2000/1/2 Samiuela LV Taufa. All Rights Reserved.

I reserve the right to be totally incorrect even at the best advice of betters. In other words, I'm probably wrong in enough places for you to call me an idiot, but don't 'cause you'll hurt my sensibilities, just tell me where I went wrong and I'll try again.

You are permitted and encouraged to use this guide for fun or for profit as you see fit. If you republish this work in what-ever form, it would be nice (though not enforceable) to be credited.

Copyright  © 2000/1/2 NoMoa.COM All rights reserved.