You’ve installed OpenBSD and rebooted into a bare-bones system. Of course, a minimal Unix-like system is actually pretty boring. While it makes for a powerful foundation, it doesn’t actually do much of anything.

To get you started, this chapter covers some of the basic steps you should take after installing OpenBSD to establish a firm platform for later work. We’ll jump right into basic tasks such as correcting the time zone, setting a default gateway, and setting an email alias for the root account.

But a bit of forewarning: You can change a surprising amount of OpenBSD’s configuration when the system is up and running. You can reconfigure the hostname, network configuration, and time and date, as well as stop, start, or reset daemons as you see fit. But just because you can doesn’t mean that you should.

While playing arbitrarily with a desktop or laptop machine might be fine, if you’re running a server, you should test your configuration by rebooting. Make sure that the system boots exactly as desired before adding services. If you find that OpenBSD boots fine but you must poke the network card before it works, fix that before proceeding.

All of the tasks in this chapter must be performed as root. We’ll discuss creating additional users in Chapter 6 and ways to avoid using the root account in Chapter 7, but you don’t need to do that on a newly installed system. Configure the system properly before you start letting people log on, or you’ll wish you had.^[10]